The Succession actor is utterly brilliant in every moment of this punchy historical miniseries. His portrayal of the crank who killed the US president in 1881 takes his mastery to the next level

“My name,” says Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen), the anti-hero of punchy four-part historical miniseries Death by Lightning, “will be known one day all across this country!” Guiteau was, until now, wrong. He tried to insert himself into history by assassinating the US president, James Garfield, in 1881 – but Garfield was only four months into his tenure, so all Guiteau did by shooting him was turn them both into difficult pub quiz answers.

Death by Lightning pays careful tribute to Garfield, a quietly extraordinary statesman, but its focus is Guiteau and, if this show is a hit, he might finally get his wish. If so, it’ll be because Charles Guiteau has become a byword for the sort of pitiable crank that Matthew Macfadyen plays better than anyone else on television.

Priscilla knows that when Chioma calls her ‘Pris’ she means no harm – but finds it very annoying. You get to name the offending party
• Take part in the Guardian’s You be the judge live event
• Get a disagreement settled or become a YBTJ juror

I hate being called Prissy – my cousins used to call me that when I was a kid and I’d get upset

Her nickname was born out of love. I feel hurt she’s framing it as if I’ve been disrespecting her

He was mentored by Buddy Guy as a teen and played for Michelle Obama in the White House. Now, the 26-year-old Mississippi guitar hero is bringing the blues back into the spotlight – and taking it to the top of the box office

Founded in 1848, Clarksdale, Mississippi, soon earned the title “the Golden Buckle on the Cotton Belt”, a place where enslaved Africans and their descendants picked cotton by the tonne. But mechanisation in the 1960s changed things. Today, the small city’s median household income is $35,210, with 40% of the populace living below the poverty line. And 80% of Clarksdale’s 14,400 residents are African American. Just another left-behind town in the poorest state in the Union? This is how Clarksdale appears to many outsiders.

Or it did until one of the biggest movies of 2025 opened with the words: “Clarksdale, Mississippi – October 16, 1932”. Why was Ryan Coogler’s Sinners set in Clarksdale? Because this forgotten settlement is also a blues mecca. The crossroads where Robert Johnson supposedly “sold his soul to the devil” is here. Bessie Smith, shattered after a car crash on Highway 61, drew her last breath in Clarksdale. WC Handy, Muddy Waters, Robert Nighthawk, Junior Parker, Ike Turner and Sam Cooke are just a handful of the celebrated blues and R&B musicians who were either born or based themselves in Clarksdale at some point across the 20th century. Now, after decades of neglect, Clarksdale is using its musical heritage to re-establish its place on the map – and one of the city’s native sons, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, is bringing the blues back to the centre of American culture.

The small communes of Lago and Conflenti are putting themselves back on the map with a series of community-run music and food festivals

On the lamp-lit steps of a sombre gothic church, a young woman stands before a microphone. Beside her, a man plucks a slow melody from his guitar. Arrayed on chairs and cobblestones in front of them, a large crowd sits in an expectant silence. From a nearby balcony, laundry sways in the sultry Calabrian breeze.

The guitar quickens, and the woman issues a string of tremulous notes with all the solemnity of a muezzin. She clutches a hand drum, beating out a rhythm that draws the crowd to its feet. As people surge forward, stamping and whirling around the square, the singing intensifies and the drum’s relentless thud deepens. The festival of Sustarìa has begun.

Street photographer Daniel Arnold searches out the candid human moments of NYC, capturing a complex city alive with characters and contradictions

This hit debut from Finland is intensely readable, but could have delved more deeply into the links between human progress and environmental destruction

In November 1741 Georg Wilhelm Steller, “theologian, naturalist, and curious man”, was shipwrecked on an island between Alaska and Russia. There he found, floating in the shallow waters, a vast sirenian, Hydrodamalis gigas, nine feet long and soon to be known as Steller’s sea cow. Having made it through the winter, largely by eating the sea cows, the following August Steller and the remaining survivors of the Great Northern Expedition left the island. Within 30 years, Steller’s sea cow was hunted to extinction.

Having described these events, Finnish author Iida Turpeinen’s debut novel goes on to describe the lives of other historical figures, each of whom are touched in some way by the sea cow, now reduced to bones. There is Hampus Furuhjelm, governor of Alaska, in search of a complete skeleton, and his sister Constance, who finds peace and intellectual autonomy among her taxidermy collection. Later, there’s Hilda Olson, a scientific illustrator, and John Grönvall, specialist in the reconstruction of birds’ eggs, who is tasked with preparing a sea cow’s relics for exhibition.

Lawyers challenge €4bn Project One development, saying emissions and health impacts vastly underestimated

The deaths from pollution caused by Europe’s biggest plastic plant, which is being built in Antwerp, will outstrip the number of permanent jobs it will create, lawyers will argue in a court challenge issued on Thursday.

In documents submitted to the court, research suggests the air pollution from Ineos’s €4bn petrochemical plant would cause 410 deaths once operational, compared with the 300 permanent jobs the company says will be created.

Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?

Once upon a time the Thursday quiz cared deeply about the changing of the seasons and the sanctity of November. Now, however, Christmas adverts are already everywhere, flamingos are on the loose, and people are questioning the moon landings again. It all feels too much. So why not distract yourself with our 15 questions about topical news and general knowledge. There are no prizes, but do let us know how you get on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 222

After it was found most offsets did not represent real carbon reductions, the money dried up. But successful schemes such as Kasigau in Kenya now face a stark future

Solomon Morris Makau checks the fallen tree for snakes before he wraps a tape measure around the trunk. The early morning sun is overwhelming in the dryland forests of the Kasigau corridor, which separates the east and west Tsavo national parks in southern Kenya. Two guards keep watch for elephants and lions. There is little sign of green among the sprawling acacias, which stand silently in their punishing wait for the end of the dry season. Despite the threat from puff adders, Makau and his team have a job to do: measure the trees and shrubs in this 50 sq metre area to calculate their growth and change in carbon stock.

“This one is lying dead,” says Makau, of one of the trees pushed over by elephants – but tens of thousands around it are still alive, stretching out in the distance as far as the eye can see.

Solomon Morris Makau, right, leads a team of environmental technicians in gathering bio data from natural vegetation

Annely Juda Fine Art, London
With this new collection of bright and bold still lifes, iPad experiments and splotchy portraits, the art-world titan is beginning to show his age in intriguing, unsteady ways that remain inimitably Hockney

He’s still at it, is David Hockney. At 88 years old, and more than 60 years into a career that has seen him rise to the very top of the contemporary art pile, Hockney is still painting, still experimenting, still innovating, and still having shows.

This exhibition – the first in a swish ultra-central London location for Annely Juda, his gallery since the 1990s – is packed with paintings so new you can almost smell the wet paint. The opening room is all eye-searingly bright still lifes: chairs, tables, fruit and flowers. It’s the most old-fashioned and staid of subject matter, but nothing Hockney does is that dull, is it?

A vegetarian classic that’s a bit like a bubbling, rustic, cheesy quiche

The first time I encountered homity pie was in a disused train carriage. It was Deptford market in the late 2000s: a reliably chaotic, noisy morass of jostling bodies, the wafted smell of sweating burger onions and a vast section where the “stalls” generally comprised gatherings of orphaned trainers, boxy VHS players and other random house-clearance items dumped on to lengths of tarpaulin. I was an eager but gastronomically green 25-year-old in my first proper flatshare and this ragtag locus of trade became an early site of core dining memories. I thoughtfully appraised very ordinary vegetables, channelling Rick Stein in Gascony; bought warm, hectically seeded granary loaves from the Percy Ingle bakery; ate average pub Thai, better kerbside rotisserie chicken; and generally tried, with limited success, to ignore the creeping sense that I had settled in a part of town that wanted for some structure or culinary vitality.

It was this atmosphere of cultural nascence into which the Deptford Project trundled. Predominantly housed on a former railway yard in the midst of redevelopment, this cafe, cultural hub and outdoor cinema was located around a decommissioned 1960s commuter train, boldly redecorated and reimagined by designer Morag Myerscough: a becalmed, brightly daubed piece of rolling stock that, between 2008 and 2014, jutted out into the high street like a glitch in the urban matrix. Though it sounds, I know, like an unforgivable cliche of “gritty” hipsterdom, the Deptford Project had a ramshackle edge, a palpable community ethos, genuinely affordable prices and a charming streak of weirdness (the toilet, if memory serves, was an eternally freezing garden shed turned into a shrine to Elvis).

A record 13 people have died in bear attacks in Japan this year – with experts blaming food shortages as the animals venture further into residential areas

Loud conversations, whistles and, when all else fails, a plastic bottle are among the precautions authorities in Japan are urging people to take to counter a surge in bear attacks.

It was a bell that Billy Halloran had to hand during a confrontation in the foothills of Myoko, northern Japan, last month. The 32-year-old New Zealander was settling into an 8km run when he spotted two Asiatic black bears about 30 metres ahead.

Days before we ran interviews with gang leaders describing their alleged ties to Nayib Bukele’s government, we left the country to avoid arrest. We fear our exile will never end

• This story, republished with permission, was originally run by El Faro English

We figured we would spend only a few days out of the country. We figured that within a week of publishing, some other matter would distract the Salvadoran government. We would weigh the risks of returning and would then go back. We left with carry-on bags: no one was carrying more than 10 pairs of underwear.

We had invented a routine for these situations, which had worked out fine so many times before: “preventive departure”. One of us, for the first time, mentioned that the government would make us pay dearly. But we kept repeating “preventive departure”. We kept repeating it a week later, two weeks later, a month after we could not return.

The largest supermoon of the year, the so-called ‘beaver’ moon is the biggest and brightest of 2025, just 357,000 km from Earth

• Watch November’s ‘beaver’ supermoon rising over Sydney’s Bondi beach – video

• Glowing September supermoon lights up the sky – in pictures

This is our message to world leaders: make this the ‘Cop of truth’, before people lose faith

• Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the president of Brazil

Today, in the Brazilian Amazon, the Belém summit opens ahead of the 30th United Nations climate change conference (Cop30). I have convened world leaders in the days leading up to the conference so that we can all commit to acting with the urgency the climate crisis demands.

If we fail to move beyond speeches into real action, our societies will lose faith – not only in the Cops, but in multilateralism and international politics more broadly. That is why I have summoned leaders to the Amazon: to make this the “Cop of truth”, the moment we demonstrate the seriousness of our shared commitment to the planet.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the president of Brazil

Reliance on overseas students’ tuition fees under scrutiny as scholars describe chilling effect of being targeted

UK academics whose research is critical of China say they have been targeted and their universities subjected to “extremely heavy” pressure from Beijing, prompting calls for a fresh look at the sector’s dependence on tuition fee income from Chinese students.

The academics spoke out after the Guardian revealed this week that Sheffield Hallam University had complied with a demand from Beijing to halt research about human rights abuses in China, which had led to a big project being dropped.

Analysts say a purge of the Russian regime’s own supporters is under way as rival factions turn on each other

A pro-Kremlin pundit who for years has hailed Vladimir Putin as one of history’s great men in appearances on foreign media. A military blogger, zealous fundraiser for Russian troops, and promoter of openly genocidal rhetoric about Ukraine.

A Ukrainian-born army volunteer and commentator for the state-controlled RT network lamenting that Russia had not launched its full-scale invasion sooner.

Source says Russia ‘very probably’ responsible amid surge in incursions into European airspace since mid-September

Belgium’s national security council will hold an emergency meeting on Thursday after drone sightings at airports caused chaos for travellers and raised security concerns.

Arrivals and departures were halted for several hours on Tuesday evening at Belgium’s busiest airport, Brussels, leading to the cancellation of dozens of flights. The skies were also closed over Liège airport, an important hub for freight transport, leading to further cancellations, delays and diversions.

Alan the assassin, Clare as Boris Johnson and of course, Celia’s fart … the dynamite scenes have come thick and fast in the inaugural series. Here are the very best bits

Remember when fans feared that an all-star edition would risk ruining the hit reality game’s magic? A triumphant inaugural VIP series of The Celebrity Traitors has blown such worries out of the Highland loch water.

Ratings have surpassed 13m, overtaking Strictly Come Dancing as the BBC’s biggest franchise. It has been the most talked-about TV show of the autumn, if not the year. Anticipation is now at fever pitch for Thursday night’s final. As we approach the endgame, relive the highlights so far with our cloak-clad catch-up …

This year marks a century since the birth of the photo booth, and friends and families are still squeezing into them for fun and unflattering snaps - capturing the highs, lows and loves of their lives

I didn’t find early motherhood easy. It wasn’t my daughter’s fault – she was, mercifully, a wonderful and cheerful baby – but I underestimated what a huge shift it would be at an already stressful time. When I was pregnant, we moved to a new town, to a wreck of a house we planned to do up. My mum, who was ill, moved in with us, and then I was the carer of a newborn and a dying parent – at the two extremes of life, but sharing many of the same needs, and often at the same time.

The deaths were mostly from drowning in flash floods, with 127 people still missing, many in the hard-hit central province of Cebu

Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos Jr has declared a state of emergency after typhoon Kalmaegi left at least 114 people dead and nearly 130 missing in central provinces in the deadliest natural disaster to hit the country this year.

The deaths were mostly from drowning in flash floods, and 127 people were still missing, many in the hard-hit central province of Cebu. The tropical cyclone blew out of the archipelago on Wednesday into the South China Sea.

A historic campaign that focused on the theme of affordability can offer wider lessons to a re-energised opposition

Since the re-election of Donald Trump last November, a demoralised Democratic party has struggled to reverse a palpable sense of downward momentum. At a grassroots level, amid plunging poll ratings, there has been a yearning for renewal and a more punchy, combative approach in opposition. Against that bleak backdrop, the remarkable election of Zohran Mamdani to the New York City mayoralty is a moment for progressives to savour.

Mr Mamdani entered the mayoral race last October as a socialist outsider with almost zero name recognition. He won it with more than 50% of the vote after the highest turnout in more than half a century, and despite the best efforts of billionaires to bankroll his chief rival, the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, to victory. That achievement makes him the youngest mayor of the US’s largest city for more than 100 years and the first Muslim to occupy the role.

When I first discovered this vaguely troubling symptom, I embarked upon my tried-and-tested routine for dealing with such things: 1. Pretend it’s not there. 2. Acknowledge it is. 3. Convince myself it’s growing

The NHS is a funny fish. It often kind of almost works brilliantly. Almost but frustratingly, not quite.

I had this thing on the back of my shoulder which, being where it was, I couldn’t quite see. I could feel it though. A moley, warty thing. I’ll spare you a fuller description.

This time last year, no one had really heard of him. Now, Zohran Mamdani is the first Muslim, millennial and person of south Asian heritage to run America’s largest city.

Jonathan Freedland speaks to Ed Pilkington about Mamdani’s historic win, his challenge to the president, and what the Democrats should take away from a successful night at the ballot box

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