The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

• Warning: gallery contains sensitive images

All six members of the independent Commission of Fine Arts were reportedly dismissed Tuesday

Donald Trump has fired all six members of an independent federal agency responsible for reviewing his controversial White House ballroom and planned ‘Arc de Trump’ in Washington DC, according to reports.

The Washington Post reported that all members of the Commission of Fine Arts were dismissed on Tuesday.

Lots include artworks by Matisse, Rodin, Kandinsky and the late actor’s own paintings – as well as his watch, dartboard and Golden Globes

Busts by Rodin and works by Kandinksy and Matisse are among some 400 items belonging to the late actor going up for auction next month.

Three Golden Globe statues, a variety of film memorabilia and annotated scripts, posters and an easel are also up for sale in the three-stage auction run by Bonhams.

Two people with false identities allegedly managed to fraudulently obtain loans, leading to liens on a fully paid home

Two people armed with a number of false identities managed to fraudulently obtain a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of loans in the name of Cam Ward, the quarterback of the National Football League’s Tennessee Titans, according to authorities.

Albert Weber, 42, and Cyntrelle Lash, 39, are facing charges of identity theft, bank fraud and forgery after their arrests in a case whose victims allegedly include the first overall pick in the 2025 NFL draft, his father and the business that loaned out the money in question, said Capt Jason Rivarde of the sheriff’s office in Jefferson parish, Louisiana, outside New Orleans.

We would like to hear from people who fell in love in 2025

We would like to hear from people who fell in love in 2025. Who are they and how did you meet? Why are they a good fit for you? What’s a nice quality or detail about them? How were you feeling about dating before you met them?

You can share your story below.

Kushner’s investment firm is backed by three Arab petrostates critical to the Gaza agreement. And the deals keep coming

In Donald Trump’s first term, his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner was omnipresent. He worked on criminal justice reform, Covid-19 vaccine development and modernizing technology across federal agencies. His portfolio extended to foreign policy, as he brokered a new North American trade agreement and negotiated peace deals in the Middle East. But when Trump returned to the White House in January, Kushner stayed out of the limelight and declined to take a formal role in the administration.

A few weeks ago, Kushner re-emerged as a central player behind Trump’s peace plan for Gaza, which so far has achieved a ceasefire, an exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners and a partial withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territory. Kushner took a victory lap, as Trump and others in the US administration gave him significant credit for helping negotiate a ceasefire after two years of Israel’s brutal war on Gaza. Kushner is being hailed as the consummate deal-maker, a private citizen whose business acumen succeeded where career diplomats failed.

India are struggling at domestic and international level, and are now missing out on hosting two superstars of the game

In September 1977 an Indian astrologer predicted that Pelé would fall ill in Kolkata and be unable to take the pitch for Santos in an exhibition against Mohun Bagan. In the end the Brazilian did actually play to the delight of 60,000 fans but almost half a century later, there was perhaps even more excitement, with Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi set to appear on the subcontinent in the space of a month. This time, though, any doomsayer would be correct. Ronaldo didn’t come in October and Messi will not in November.

Without getting into that debate, Ronaldo’s absence is more painful simply because he was due to play in a competitive fixture, by some distance the biggest name ever to appear in a real game on Indian soil. August’s draw for the AFC Champions League Two put Al-Nassr in the same group as FC Goa, where the hotel for the visitors reserved the presidential suite for the five-time Ballon d’Or winner for the 22 October game.

A recent spate of posts has garnered attention, but Trump and his allies have long been using gaming imagery to mobilise a toxic subculture of ‘rootless white males’

Just days after Microsoft announced Halo: Campaign Evolved, the next game in its famous science-fiction series, the White House shared an interesting picture on X. The image, which appears to be AI-generated, shows President Donald Trump wearing the armour of Halo’s iconic protagonist, Master Chief, standing in salute in front of an American flag that’s missing several stars. In his left hand is an energy sword, a weapon used by the alien enemies in the Halo games. Posted in response to a tweet from US game retailer GameStop, the text accompanying the image reads “Power to the Players” in reference to the store’s slogan.

GameStop and the White House exchanged another Halo meme or two, and then, on 27 October, the official Department of Homeland Security X account joined in – using Halo imagery of a futuristic soldier in an alien world to encourage people to join its increasingly militaristic Immigration Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Stop the Flood, this one reads, equating the US’s immigrant population with the parasitic aliens that Master Chief eliminates.

The New Zealand legend played with joy and fun, but was also a true fighter who spanned eras in the women’s game

As the Women’s World Cup has progressed, sanding down the edges and turning up the four semi-finalists you might have predicted from the start, a sideshow has been quietly playing stage left. A down-to-earth sideshow – just like the woman herself – the Sophie Devine farewell.

Devine made her New Zealand debut in October 2006, in an ODI and T20 series against Australia. Nineteen years later, still with the same open face and broad smile, she has played her final one-day international – a losing affair against England neither side will polish up for the mantelpiece. The most memorable moment came at the end with the affectionate guard of honour given to Devine by both sides and the Māori tribute led by Melie Kerr and sung by her teary teammates as the stadium emptied.

She was one of her country’s most famous comedians. After throwing it in to pursue her musical dream, she minted a spooky, singular sound that made fans of David Byrne and Feist. At 64, her irreverence remains intact

Juana Molina answers our video call from a hospital bed, reclining in a green T-shirt with two cannulas in her hand. She has done her back in while also playing Whack-a-Mole with hernias, two last year, and two new ones now. “Do you know those toys, made of little pieces of wood, and you press the bottom and it goes” – she makes herself floppy, mimicking a push puppet – “that’s exactly how I was yesterday.” But now, says the 64-year-old Argentinian musician, “I have so many painkillers, that I …” She wobbles her eyelids, gurns and gives me two thumbs up.

For the avoidance of doubt, Molina seems entirely with it, and insists we continue when I offer to reschedule. She is ultra precise on the technical odyssey she undertook to make her new record, and also extremely funny company, cheeky and withering about anyone who’s too serious – or worse, boring.

Director of Netflix hit said US government claims that the nuclear strike drama is inaccurate did not reflect the world’s ‘really combustible environment’

Warning: contains a spoiler for the plot of House of Dynamite

Kathryn Bigelow, the director of Netflix thriller House of Dynamite, which depicts government officials responding to a nuclear strike on the US, has responded to criticism by the Pentagon over the accuracy of its defence systems.

Speaking alongside writer Noah Oppenheim to the Hollywood Reporter, the Oscar-winning film-maker defended the film, saying: “I just state the truth. In this piece, it’s all about realism and authenticity.”

Season two of the Adam Brody and Kristen Bell-starring show feels like a long infomercial thanks to endless product placement

After a long day, it’s nice to put on some sweats, pour yourself a glass of wine, turn on the TV and cozy up to an advertisement for Estée Lauder Advanced Night Repair Serum Synchronized Multi-Recovery Complex.

Or at least that’s what I found myself doing on Sunday night, when I returned for season two of Netflix’s Nobody Wants This. In the series, Adam Brody plays the so-called “hot rabbi” and love interest of Kristen Bell’s character, an atheist podcaster considering conversion. Together, the pair navigate cultural differences and disapproving family members. Or at least I assume that’s what happened – I was too distracted by all the product placement to focus on the plot.

Videos about personality science are going viral on social media, but beware of giving them credence ...

In the 1950s, a secretary in a San Francisco medical office noticed something weird: some of the chairs in the waiting room needed to be reupholstered more frequently than others. Patients with coronary disease, she realised, nearly always arrived on time and gravitated towards hard upholstered chairs rather than comfy sofas. They’d then sit on the edge of the chair, fidget, and aggressively leap up when their names were called.

This insight took on a life of its own. First it helped inspire the cardiologists she reportedly mentioned it to – Dr Ray Rosenman and Dr Meyer Friedman, who wrote a 1959 paper that essentially invented the idea of a “type A” personality. It classified competitive, productivity-obsessed workaholics as demonstrating “overt behaviour pattern A”, and argued they were more likely to get heart attacks. They later wrote a book, Type A Behaviour and Your Heart, which became a bestseller. Familiar story, eh? A woman has an insight which is then monetised by two men.

Big win leaves many wondering if result reflects genuine support for president or corrosive US influence

Opposition posters scattered across Buenos Aires before Sunday’s midterms showed president Javier Milei’s name plastered over a US flag, in a bid to tap into anti-American sentiment over Donald Trump’s alleged interference in Argentina’s election.

Days before the vote, the US president announced a $40bn bailout for his Argentinian counterpart but warned that if Milei did not win he would withdraw his support.

Study finds lapses of attention in sleep-deprived people coincide with wave of fluid flowing out of the brain

It’s never a great look. The morning meeting is in full swing but thanks to a late night out your brain switches off at the precise moment a question comes your way.

Such momentary lapses in attention are a common problem for the sleep deprived, but what happens in the brain in these spells of mental shutdown has proved hard to pin down.

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4th over: South Africa 21-0 (Wolvaardt 13, Brits 6) Neat and tidy from Smith. That Bell semi-drop not withstanding, the BBC report that – stats wise - England are the best fielding team in the competition.

3rd over: South Africa 19-0 (Wolvaardt 12, Brits 5) A half-chance not held. Brits flays Bell back back with fire, through the left hand of her follow through and down to the rope.

Most Asian stock markets rally on trade deal optimism, ahead of expected US interest rate cut

As ministers are drawing up proposals to increase the amount the NHS spends on new medicines, potentially by up to 25%, with an announcement expected as soon as the end of this week, GSK boss Emma Walmsley said she was “hopeful and ambitious” that the standoff with the pharma industry can be resolved.

Without pricing reform, the UK will struggle to be a life sciences superpower, she warned. She told reporters:

We are great supporters of the life sciences industrial strategy in the UK. And I’ve been very consistent on our view that it’s key to execute against that in terms of the opportunity for clinical trials and the opportunity for having translational facilities, all of the work that can be done with the data, but it is absolutely key that we have a competitive, commercial environment that recognises the value of innovation.

Obviously we’re engaging, watching, contributing as we can. And, I would say: hopeful and ambitious.

What everyone is putting the energy into, hopefully resolving, is how we make sure this country creates the right commercial environment. And without that, I think it’s going to be very difficult to be able to be a leading life sciences superpower… and without that, we are not going to secure something else we all want, which is patient access to innovation. You have to remember that the cost of drugs as a share of the total cost of health care is less than 10% in this country.

We absolutely agree we should be working towards constructive reform in the US system that we want to have affordable, accessible drugs in a sustainable way.

We remain very cautious about the environment in the US, although we did reassert today, we expect to be at the top end of our current vaccines guidance, and that’s really because we’re seeing great momentum ex US, particularly in Europe this quarter.

• Updates from the T20I at Manuka Oval in Canberra

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Abhishek Sharma has lit up the T20 in Canberra but all good things must come to an end. After throwing his bat at anything and everything it is a tame dismissal as the 25-year-old chips to Tim David at mid-off. Abhishek mis-read a slower ball from Nathan Ellis but that was some clever bowling.

3rd over: India 26-0 (Abhishek 19, Gill 7) Shubman Gill is batting in his partner’s shadow but gets the runs flowing with a top edge over the keeper to the rope. Hazlewood did everything right by bowling back of a length but is unfortunate not to pick up a wicket. Abhishek ruins what was otherwise a tidy over with a glance off his hip over short fine leg for another boundary.

Exclusive: Inside a Russian bid to free Horațiu Potra, a mercenary held in Dubai accused of conspiring to ‘overthrow constitutional order’ in Romania

Russian figures close to the Kremlin are mounting a last-minute attempt to halt the extradition from Dubai of a Romanian-French mercenary wanted in Romania for plotting a coup, the Guardian can reveal.

Horațiu Potra, a shadowy former French Foreign Legionnaire, was arrested at Dubai airport on 24 September alongside his son and nephew as they prepared to board a flight to Moscow. Romanian investigators had accused the men of conspiring with Potra’s ally, the far-right politician Călin Georgescu, to “overthrow the constitutional order”.

The world of soccer throws up no shortage of questions on a regular basis. In today’s column, Graham Ruthven endeavors to answer three of them

Rory Delap was apparently ahead of his time. The spirit of Stoke City’s legendary ball flinger lives on with the long throw-in enjoying a renaissance in the Premier League this season. Indeed, statistics show that the number of long throw-ins per match has more than doubled from last season, pointing to a very real and meaningful trend.

Make Israel release Marwan Barghouti, the ‘Palestinian Mandela’. The future of peace in the region depends on it

Dear Donald Trump,

You still want that Nobel peace prize, right? You believe you deserve it, don’t you? Even as you send the world’s biggest warship towards Venezuela, promise to just “kill people that are bringing drugs into our country … they’re going to be, like dead”, and threaten further national guard invasions of Democratic-run cities here in the United States.

Mehdi Hasan is a broadcaster, author and a former host on MSNBC. He is also a Guardian US columnist and the editor-in-chief of Zeteo

The coach should rethink his halfback combination and stand down his old pack for the game at Everton’s stadium

By No Helmets Required

Having bet the house on Hull KR hero Mikey Lewis being the problem that Australia could not solve, England coach Shaun Wane has retreated home to Wigan to ponder whether he should have stuck rather than twisted. Dropping Harry Smith for the Ashes opener, and favouring treble-winner Lewis to partner captain George Williams in the halves, was surprising but understandable. Lewis, the player of the match in the Super League Grand Final, was in the form of his life. But the Williams-Lewis combination struggled to open up Australia. If they fail again on Saturday in Liverpool, Wane’s dream of winning the Ashes will be over.

“Our last plays disappointed me most,” said Wane after the 26-6 defeat at Wembley. “They outkicked us.” It’s rare anyone outkicks Wigan player Smith. Lewis mixed up his kicks under the arch, but very little troubled Australia. The best attacking kick was a 40-20 from replacement hooker Jez Litten when England trailed by three scores. Even then, Williams fumbled close to the line and five seconds later Reece Walsh had got to the halfway line.

This wildly atmospheric tale of a party for dying people in a crumbling seaside hotel borrows tropes from cosy crime, but is truly chilling

Living is hard emotional work – until you try dying. Alongside the rage many terminally ill people feel against the dying of the light, there are the memories that return to flagellate the conscience: the failures of kindness, the misjudged words that can’t be unsaid, the feelings left catastrophically unexpressed. Crimes of the heart – and sometimes, worse.

The malaise of regret and the yearning for absolution vibrate through Andrew Michael Hurley’s latest work of fiction, a wildly atmospheric, deceptively simple tale that borrows tropes from cosy crime only to snare you into something deeper, darker and more chilling.

Kathryn Bigelow’s Netflix ‘what if?’ drama is the director’s most frustratingly assembled and visually flat film to date

Bestowed on an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can be both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can serve as protection: viewing an ennobled director’s films through this prism, auteurist critics can feel obliged to make excuses for even the worst among them. (The rationale is that a bad film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best efforts of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can leave a creative patrolling a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn’t spark is all the greater. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals this past weekend are anything to go by – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director’s steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?) Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.