Dance Centre Kenya, one of the leading performing arts schools in east Africa providing opportunities for talented young dancers from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, has staged The Nutcracker for its 10th-anniversary annual ballet production, at the Kenya National Theatre in Nairobi
A festive musical blends fairytale optimism with lush orchestration and Sound of Music sweetness – even if this often overwhelms a thin storyline
Reported to be the first Thai musical in 50 years, The Christmas Dream is directed by Englishman Paul Spurrier, and is an intriguing blend of new and old: a modern Oliver Twist that progresses from the country’s northern hills to Bangkok, with old-school Technicolor trappings and emotionally lush showstoppers aplenty (written by Spurrier and set to an orchestral score by Mickey Wongsathapornpat).
With a Michelle Yeoh-like resoluteness but half her size, Amata Masmalai plays 10-year-old schoolgirl Lek, who is forced to flee after her abusive stepfather Nin (Only God Forgives’ Vithaya Pansringarm) fatally beats her mother (Chomphupak Poonpol). Hitting the road with her one-legged doll Bella for company, Lek has only a strong moral compass to guide her to the new home she is promised by her mum’s ghost. A number of picaresque companions put it to the test, including a spoiled rich girl (Kathaya Chongprasith) desperate for a friend and a quack doctor (Adam Kaokept) hawking dodgy cure-alls.
Going away for the festive season has left me with unforgettable memories, from a boat trip with Bangladeshi fishermen to exploring Castro’s Cuban hideout
I have made a point of escaping Christmas for as long as I can remember. Not escaping for Christmas, but avoiding it altogether – the stressful buildup, consumer chaos, panic buying, the enforced jollity and parties. When the first festive gifts start appearing in the shops in September, it’s time to confirm my travel plans, ideally to include New Year’s Eve as well.
Sometimes I travel independently, but more often in a group, and while it’s not always possible to avoid the tinsel and baubles – even in non-Christian countries thousands of miles away – I just relish not being at home at this time of year.
Correspondence between the Lord of the Flies author and his editor reveals one of the great literary collaborations of the age
When William Golding submitted Lord of the Flies to Faber in 1953 it had already been rejected at least seven times, maybe as many as 20. Charles Monteith could tell from the dog-eared typescript that it had done the rounds, and a reader for Faber called it “absurd and uninteresting … Rubbish and dull. Pointless.” But Monteith, young and new to the job, could see the book’s potential, and suggested ways that Golding – then a Salisbury-based schoolmaster in his early 40s – might improve it. More radically cut and revised than Monteith expected, the novel became a school syllabus classic. Thus began an author-editor friendship that lasted 40 years.
Their early exchanges by post were formal in the extreme: it took two years for Dear Monteith, Dear Golding to become Dear Charles, Dear Bill. But as provincial grammar school boys who both read English at Oxford, the two were attuned to each other. And after the rescue act performed on his first novel, Golding remained humbly grateful for whatever help he could get: “I’m in your hands as usual. I’ve no particular feeling of possession over the book.” Monteith’s touch was gentle for the next few years: enthusiastic, even effusive, he reassured Golding that his drafts of The Inheritors and Free Fall were the finished product. With later novels, such as The Spire and Rites of Passage, editorial feedback was tougher and more extensive. But there were no fallings out. “I’ve always had a feeling of you there, present but not breathing down my neck!” Golding said. He never seriously considered moving to another publishing house.
Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong pro-democracy media tycoon, is facing life in prison after being found guilty of national security and sedition offences, in one of the most closely watched rulings since the city’s return to Chinese rule in 1997.
Soon after the ruling was delivered, rights and press groups decried the verdict as a “sham conviction” and an attack on press freedom.
Josh Tongue comes in for Gus Atkinson for Adelaide Test
Brook rues ‘shocking shots’ in Perth and Brisbane
England have made one change to their line-up for the third Ashes Test, with Josh Tongue coming in as a like-for-like replacement for Gus Atkinson in the bowling attack.
Seamer Atkinson failed to take a wicket in the series opener in Perth, although he did make a useful 37 runs with the bat in the second innings, before returning figures of 3-151 in the second Test in Brisbane.
Australia experienced one of its deadliest mass shootings in its history on Sunday when two gunmen opened fire on a Jewish celebration at Bondi in Sydney. At least 16 people are dead, including one of the alleged killers.
Here is what we know so far:
On Sunday at 6.47pm local time, police and emergency services were called to Archer Park next to Sydney’s Bondi beach after reports of gunshots.
Footage shared on social media showed two gunman firing continuously at a large group who had gathered to celebrate the Jewish festival of Hanukah.
At least 16 people are dead, including one of the alleged shooters. Among the dead are holocaust survivor Alexander Kleytman, London-born rabbi Eli Schlanger, French national Dan Elkayam, businessman Reuven Morrison, retired police officer Peter Meagher and a 10-year-old girl. Police believe the oldest victim is 87.
Forty-two people were taken to hospital after the attack. At 1pm local time on Monday, there were 27 people in Sydney hospitals. Six were in a critical condition, six were in a critical but stable condition and 15 were in a stable condition.
Two police officers were among the injured and were both in a critical but stable condition.
Police said they were treating the attack as an act of terrorism.
The alleged gunmen were a 50-year-old, who was shot by police and died at the scene, and his 24-year-old son, who suffered critical injuries and was taken to hospital under police guard where he remained on Monday.
Police have not named the alleged gunmen, but media have identified them as Naveed Akram and his father, Sajid Akram.
Naveed Akram is an Australian-born citizen, the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, said. His father arrived in 1998 on a student visa, transferred in 2001 to a partner visa and, after trips overseas, had been on resident return visas three times.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said the son first came to the attention of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Asio) in October 2019. He was examined “on the basis of being associated with others”.
New South Wales police and the director general of Asio, Mike Burgess, said one of the shooters was known to authorities, “but not in an immediate threat perspective”.
The NSW police commissioner, Mal Lanyon, said the father was a licensed firearms holder with six guns.
Bomb disposal experts removed two active improvised explosive devices from the scene. Police said on Monday a third IED was located at Bondi.
The outrageous Scottish sitcom became a sleeper hit – then its co-creator died tragically. Ahead of its festive special, the stars open up about the show’s poignant comeback
When taxi drivers in London started shouting punchlines at him – that’s when Jonathan Watson knew that Two Doors Down, the BBC Scotland sitcom set in a Glasgow suburb, had gone from slow-burn to blazing.
The yelling is appropriate in itself, since Watson’s character, Colin, is congenitally unfiltered. Whether it’s telling his neighbours they needn’t worry about a spate of burglaries because “nobody’ll target your place – they’ll want stuff they can actually sell”, or sharing the secrets of his Tinder success: “You have a chat: ‘How are you? I just put on a wash,’ and the next thing she’s in my bed, well more on top of it with a towel down …”
Revolution is still being sought three decades after the landmark ruling with a Dutch lawyer calling for a collective bargaining agreement for players
On 15 December 1995, judges at the European court of justice (CJEU) took two minutes to bring an end to a legal process that had lasted five years. The Bosman rule, as it was known, was to stand, the judges said. European football clubs were no longer allowed to demand transfer fees for players whose contracts had expired, with governing bodies stopped from capping the number of Europeans in any team. The man whose dogged legal pursuit had brought about these changes, Jean‑Marc Bosman, emerged from a crowd of cameras and well‑wishers to give his verdict. “I have got to the top of the mountain and I am now very tired,” he said.
For Bosman himself, it was downhill from there. “In the past I got a lot of promises but never received anything,” he told the Observer in 2015, claiming he “earned nothing” from the changes that ensued. He went bankrupt, was treated for alcoholism and was found guilty of assault against his then partner in 2013, resulting in a community service order that included mowing the grass of his local football pitch. There can be no argument, however, that the ruling that took his name was historic and, 30 years on, it has helped bring about a revolution in the sport from which the man himself was ultimately shunned.
Resolution Foundation report comes in week when data is expected to show October unemployment rise
Young people are bearing the brunt of Britain’s jobs downturn, according to a report, before official figures this week that are expected to show the UK unemployment rate rising to 5.1%.
The Resolution Foundation thinktank said a “jobs deficit” was pushing a growing number of graduates and non-graduates into unemployment as employers reduced hiring.
He wrote poems named after Kylie songs and named his collection of erotic fiction after her indie album. He even loved the B-sides. So what did the avant garde writer find so inspiring about the mini Melbourne marvel?
Kevin Killian was obsessed with stars. Not in a metaphysical sense, like the grand lineage of poets that went before him, but the celebrity kind. Some were A-listers – he kept a vast database on Julia Roberts – and some more obscure. In 2000, taken by the work of cult literary sensation JT LeRoy, and confusion about their identity, Killian gave public readings of their work in San Francisco, where he had lived for 20 years after moving from New York. He would also turn unknown poets into local celebrities, hosting poetry events and making rapturous introductions to crowds that were occasionally outnumbered by the people on stage. “Anyone he admired was an A-lister,” says poet and friend, Evan Kennedy, “especially unknown poets. He’d enthuse about someone, and I’d say ‘Who?’ Kevin engaged the Bay Area poetry scene like Warhol did his Factory – but unlike Warhol, it wasn’t centred around him or his work.”
Killian – a figure in San Francisco’s New Narrative movement, alongside writers such as Kathy Acker and Robert Glück – saved his biggest celebrity obsession, however, for Kylie Minogue. She ran through his work like letters in a stick of rock. In 2008, he published Action Kylie, a poetry collection that included works named after Kylie songs (Slow, Spinning Around, Your Disco Needs You), and more abstract scenarios, such as the lovelorn An Audience with Kylie Minogue, in which lyrics from Fever intertwine with the mundanity of Love Hearts sweets. A year later, in 2009, Killian published Impossible Princess, an award-winning collection of gay erotic fiction named after Kylie’s misunderstood 1997 opus. She’d crop up elsewhere too, reflecting Killian’s bonafides as a proper fan. Tightrope, from 2014’s Tweaky Village collection, is named after a Kylie B-side, and highlights how “All her best songs saved as B-sides or just leaked on to the internet, where they live on as fan favourites”.
After weeks of allegations of schoolboy racism, the Reform leader is doubling down. And our political establishment is allowing it
Just as I was starting to write this column, an email alert popped up on my screen. “Punters back Nigel for prime minister after Keir Starmer,” it read, placing the Reform leader second in the odds market after Wes Streeting. What a weird, dissonant duality this is. Nigel Farage is in his fourth week of revelations about alleged racist behaviour at school, and yet, here we are. This is one of those twilight-zone moments in British politics, where it seems something is going to “cut through” any minute now. For a moment it seems as if it absolutely will. And then, there’s a loss of momentum and a return to the status quo. In my mind it manifests like a battle of physical forces, acting on one another. Journalistic investigations, testimonies, whistleblowers, all as a sort of storm that blows on a political actor who may be knocked off his feet, but still manages to cling on by his fingernails, until the gale blows over.
Up scrambles Farage, a few pieces and more than a few polling points knocked off him, but still in place. This is, so far, what he is managing to survive – the testimonies of some 28 of Farage’s contemporaries at Dulwich college who have told the Guardian that they experienced or witnessed racist or antisemitic behaviour when he was a teenager. Jewish students were taunted; “gas them,” Farage said, “Hitler was right”. A black student, much younger than the then 17-year-old Farage, was told: “That’s the way back to Africa.” The allegations amount, in my reading, to a sort of obsessive campaign against minority students, pursued with the kind of bewildering commitment that anyone who has ever been bullied will feel in their bones.
RHS predicts big shift in gardening habits as green-fingered Britons adapt to climate breakdown
Bouquets of cut flowers will be swapped for tabletop vegetable plants next year, the Royal Horticultural Society has said, as the UK charity announces its top plant trend predictions for 2026.
Mini-planters of aubergines, chillies, peppers and tomatoes will be displayed in homes instead of flowers, as breeders develop dwarf varieties that are decorative and capable of supplementing the weekly shop, the RHS says.
At least two people were killed and nine others injured in Saturday attack that occurred in engineering building on Providence, Rhode Island campus
A person of interest detained after a mass shooting at Brown University that killed two students and injured nine is being released after the investigation took law enforcement authorities in a “different direction,” officials said Sunday night.
The disclosure, made at a hastily convened late night news conference, represents a stunning turn of events in an investigation into killings that rattled the Ivy League campus, and came more than 12 hours after officials had announced that they had taken a person into custody.
The Rhode Island attorney general, Peter Neronha, said of the man who was detained earlier, there is “no basis to consider him a person of interest.”
‘I will be pleased … I just want my players happy’
United host Bournemouth in league on Monday
Ruben Amorim has said he would be “really pleased” if Kobbie Mainoo decided to speak to him about a loan move away from Manchester United.
Amorim has not started Mainoo in any of United’s 15 Premier League games, with the midfielder’s only start coming in the Carabao Cup defeat at Grimsby. In light of that, Amorim was asked in the buildup to Monday’s visit of Bournemouth if the 20-year-old had spoken to him regarding a temporary move.
Weeks after jewel heist, world’s most visited museum in dispute over staffing, renovations and ticket price rises
Trade unions at the crisis-hit Louvre museum in Paris will begin a strike on Monday to demand urgent renovations and staffing increases, and to protest against a rise in ticket prices for most non-EU visitors, including British and American tourists.
The world’s most-visited museum – which has had a difficult few months after a jewel heist, a damaging water leak and safety fears over a gallery ceiling – could face days of partial or total closure at one of its busiest times of the year if many of its 2,100-strong workforce vote to continue striking.
Family friend, sources in Russia and Syria, and leaked data help give rare insight into life of dictator’s reclusive household
In 2011, a group of teenage boys spray-painted a warning on to a wall in their school playground: “It’s your turn, Doctor.” The graffiti was a thinly veiled threat that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, a London-trained ophthalmologist, would be next in the line of Arab dictators toppled by the then raging Arab spring.
It took 14 years, during which 620,000 were killed and nearly 14 million displaced, but eventually the doctor’s turn came and Assad was deposed, fleeing to Moscow in the middle of the night.
Emergency help should be available, but some being forced to travel 100 miles or go private, says Healthwatch England
People needing emergency dental care in England are being denied help from the NHS despite guidance saying that it should be available, in some cases resorting to risky self-treatment such as pulling out their own teeth, the patient watchdog has found.
Patients who experience a sudden dental crisis such as a broken tooth, abscess or severe tooth pain are meant to be able to get help from their dentist or by calling NHS 111.
After years as Hollywood’s romcom darling, Hudson is putting music at the centre of her career – and after her show-stealing turn in Song Sung Blue, the Oscar buzz is growing
The first voice I hear when I enter the hotel room to meet Kate Hudson belongs to her 21-year-old son, Ryder, who speaks from the end of a phone: “Love you, Mum!”
Doesn’t everyone? You don’t have to be related to Hudson to consider her a joyous proposition – a great performer who hasn’t yet made a great film. It was a quarter-century ago in Almost Famous, her breakthrough picture, that she first proved she could hoist a movie out of the doldrums while making the task appear as effortless as blow-drying her hair. Without her performance as Penny Lane, the rock’n’roll muse who describes herself as a “band-aid” rather than a groupie, Cameron Crowe’s dopey valentine to the 1970s of his youth would have been Almost Forgettable.
It started out as a fringe musical about an outlandish war plan – and became a West End and Broadway smash. As the show hits China, Australia and Mexico, its ‘nerd’ creators explain how they went global with a box of hats and a dream
Natasha Hodgson is wondering what to make of all the straight women who have developed a crush on her. Or, to put it more accurately, all the straight women who have developed a crush on her when she’s dressed as a second world war naval intelligence officer and speaking in a silly voice. But is it really Hodgson these woman have fallen for? Or is it Ewen Montagu, the bombastic, braces-wearing war hero she plays in the hit musical Operation Mincemeat?
“The confusion is real,” says Hodgson. “These women come to the show believing themselves to be straight, then they have a total identity crisis. But hey – if that’s not what musical theatre is for, I don’t know what is!”
Though once so despairing she thought of giving up the law for art, Kateryna Rashevska is still pushing for the return of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by the invaders
At only 28, the human rights lawyer Kateryna Rashevska has become the public face of Ukraine’s campaign to repatriate children forcibly deported to Russia. She knows this means she is being watched.
The past two years have seen the Ukrainian addressing the UN security council, the US Senate and writing submissions to the international criminal court (ICC), which then issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children.
The comforting tourist-brochure idea of what Italian food looks like obscures a story shaped by hunger, migration and innovation
Alberto Grandi is the author of La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste and a professor of food history at the University of Parma
Italy’s cuisine has now joined Unesco’s “intangible” heritage list, an announcement greeted within the country with the sort of collective euphoria usually reserved for surprise World Cup runs or the resignation of an unpopular prime minister. Not because the world needed permission to enjoy pizza – it clearly didn’t – but because the news soothed a longstanding national irritation: France and Japan, recognised in 2010 and 2013, had beaten us to it. For Italy’s culinary patriots, this had become a psychological pebble in the shoe: a tiny, persistent reminder that someone else had been validated first.
Yet the strength of Italian cuisine has never rested on an ancient, coherent culinary canon. Most of what passes for ancient “regional tradition” was assembled in the late 20th century, largely for tourism and domestic reassurance. The real history of Italian food is turbulent: a saga of hunger, improvisation, migration, industrialisation and sheer survival instinct. It is not a serene lineage of grandmothers, sunlit tables and recipes carved in marble. It is closer to a national long-distance sprint from starvation – not quite the imagery Italy chose to present to Unesco.
Alberto Grandi is the author of La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste and a professor of food history at the University of Parma
Japanese green tea named stain of the year as survey finds Aperol spritz and bubble tea are also leaving their mark
It used to be curry sauce, egg yolk and red wine that ruined Britain’s clothes but in a sign of the times laundry detergents are being reformulated to tackle stains left by matcha lattes, Aperol spritz and bubble tea.
In a month when year-end gongs are dished out, from BBC Sports Personality to Pantone’s Colour of 2026 (a white called “cloud dancer”), matcha has received the dubious accolade “stain of the year”.
Authorities investigating ‘apparent homicide’ after 78-year-old director of Stand By Me and The Princess Bride was discovered dead at LA home with wife
Rob Reiner, the director of beloved films including When Harry Met Sally, Misery, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride and This is Spinal Tap, has died aged 78 in an apparent homicide, along with his 68-year-old wife Michele Singer Reiner.
Reports first began to emerge on Sunday afternoon that the bodies of a 78-year-old man and a 68-year-old woman had been found by authorities inside a home owned by Reiner in Brentwood, Los Angeles, after a medical aid request was made to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
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