Michael Prescott tells select committee ‘there was no ideology at play’ when he wrote memo

Caroline Daniel is also asked about her views on editorial bias.

“My experience was the BBC took issues of impartiality extremely seriously,” she said.

Oliver Chu from California first person to have the one-off treatment for Hunter syndrome

Doctors are cautiously optimistic about a groundbreaking gene therapy for children affected by a devastating inherited disorder after seeing positive results in the first boy to receive the treatment.

Three-year-old Oliver Chu from California became the first patient to have the therapy nine months ago as part of a clinical trial run by researchers in Manchester. It is too early to call the therapy a success, but doctors are encouraged by his progress so far.

Improvements such as reduced ‘bad’ cholesterol and lower blood pressure go into reverse upon stopping weight-loss jabs

People who stop using the weight-loss jab Mounjaro not only tend to regain weight, but experience a reversal in other health improvements too, research suggests.

Mounjaro, which contains the active ingredient tirzepatide, has become a popular medication for weight loss, with studies suggesting that it can help people lose an average of 20% of their body weight after 72 weeks of treatment.

Frenchman has never been far from the headlines since 2023 but he is finally back gliding across a football field

By Get French Football News

How much can you learn from Paul Pogba’s nine-minute cameo? Perhaps just that he does indeed exist and not only in columns, fitness updates and social media posts. That is where he has existed for the past 26 months, since his final game for Juventus in September 2023: equally at the centre of our gaze and absent from it.

Between his four-year doping ban, reduced to 18 months on appeal, his release from Juventus, and the extortion and kidnapping case that led to his brother being sentenced to three years in prison, his name has been constantly uttered but his face has been rarely seen – at least not on a football pitch.

Eberechi Eze’s hat-trick and Manchester City’s loss to Newcastle means Arsenal are in control of their own destiny

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So it turns out those who had already handed the title to Arsenal were right after all.

It’s absurd, of course, to start handing out the title in November but a feature of modern football is how obsessed it becomes so early with title races. It’s perhaps a legacy of the Pep Guardiola-Jürgen Klopp rivalry’s peak, when being champion meant amassing more than 95 points. It made sense then to scan the track far ahead for any potential hurdles because there were so few. But less than a third of the way through this season, Manchester City, who remain probably the biggest danger to Arsenal, have already dropped as many points as they did in the entirety of 2017-18, their 100-point campaign.

Following criticism, the president accused Ukraine of ingratitude but also added the plan was ‘not my final offer’. Which parts of it will survive?

The US president, Donald Trump, has said “something good just may be happening” at the talks in Switzerland intended to end the war in Ukraine. European and Ukrainian negotiators have been attempting to “rework” the 28-point peace plan that the president put forward last week into one more favourable to Ukraine. Trump keeps signalling that he is willing to compromise, but his original plan put Ukraine in a very tough starting position, handing Vladimir Putin concessions that Russia has so far failed to gain on the battlefield.

It is true Russia has made recent advances – especially around Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad in Donetsk province, and in parts of Zaporizhzhia. And Ukraine lacks the troops and firepower to retake all the territory lost since 2022, let alone Crimea. But the Ukrainian army isn’t about to unravel, and neither is Putin close to fulfilling his original objective: conquering the four Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Russia fully controls only Luhansk. This war could drag on until the summer. By then, Putin’s forces will have fought Ukraine for as long as Stalin’s fought Nazi Germany.

Some of Russia’s maximalist demands have been removed from original 28-point proposal, it is understood

• Europe live – latest updates

Ukraine has significantly amended the US “peace plan” for Ukraine, removing some of Russia’s maximalist demands, people familiar with the negotiations said, as European leaders warned on Monday that no deal could be reached quickly.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy may meet Donald Trump in the White House later this week, they indicated, amid a flurry of calls between Kyiv and Washington. Ukraine is also pressing for Europe to be involved in the talks.

The actor ran her own theatre company and was described by her daughter Emma as ‘feisty, outrageous, kind, loving and mischievous’

Jill Freud, a stage star who was also the inspiration for the character of Lucy in CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, has died aged 98.

The news was announced by her daughter, Emma Freud, who wrote: “My beautiful 98-year-old mum has taken her final bow. After a loving evening – where we knew she was on her way – surrounded by children, grandchildren and pizza, she told us all to fuck off so she could go to sleep. And then she never woke up. Her final words were ‘I love you’.”

• Guardiola: ‘I apologised after one second’

• ‘Losing four games, we have to improve a lot’

Pep Guardiola has admitted his shame at a dispute with a camera operator after Manchester City’s 2‑1 defeat at Newcastle on Saturday.

At full time the visibly upset City manager entered the St James’ Park pitch and had heated discussions with the referee, Sam Barrott, and Newcastle’s Bruno Guimarães, while also handling the headphones of the camera operator.

Blockbuster sequel Wicked: For Good has become the latest film to receive complaints about both the lack of colour and the inconsistent lighting

We all know the late-night slog of finding something to watch, flicking between streaming services until settling on a series someone mentioned at work. And then a few minutes later, you’re squinting, adjusting your lighting or playing around with TV settings – it’s a night-time scene and you’re unable to make out what’s going on. Prompting the question: ‘When did everything on screen get so dark?’

This question isn’t new, gaining traction after a few incredibly poorly lit battle scenes in the final season of Game of Thrones, with articles and posts popping up begging explanation, one Reddit user commenting: “If you need an article to defend that not being able to see shit is a stylistic choice, maybe the stylistic choice should be reconsidered.”

‘The control room buttons were upside-down ice-cube trays, one space suit had a dish-drying rack on it – and the special effects guy wrote the theme tune lyrics’

In 1970, I partnered with Dan O’Bannon, a classmate at the University of Southern California, on a senior student project. We wanted to make a science fiction movie inspired by Dr Strangelove and 2001. We had no money but we did have enormous ambition. Dan co-wrote it, and he was also its production designer and editor, and he acted in the movie, playing Sergeant Pinback.

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

Resin fruit peel, bronze bin bags and marble loo rolls are among the items of detritus being immortalised by artists – and fetching a high price

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On the second floor of Hany Armanious’s exhibition at Buxton Contemporary in Melbourne, a curl of tangerine peel lies on a shelf, its yellowing, pithy insides facing upwards. It feels like it should be cleaned up, but it won’t be. The rind is not rubbish discarded by a careless visitor: it’s a perfect resin cast made by Armanious.

Placed carefully around the gallery are resin recreations of other items more commonly seen in bins: a group of melted candles, blobs of Blu-Tack, crumbly chunks of polystyrene. These might seem unlikely subjects for an exhibition, but Armanious is one of several artists who have turned their eye to trash in recent years. Gavin Turk, Ai Weiwei, Susan Collis and Glen Hayward, among others, all go to similarly painstaking – and often expensive – lengths to recreate items that most people would not look twice at. Trompe l’œil sculptures of rubbish have been exhibited in museums around the world and fetched high prices at galleries and auctions. In October, a pile of six garbage bags cast in bronze by Turk sold for £82,550 (roughly AU$167,000) at Sotheby’s in London.

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You wake up to messages, you go to sleep to messages, you duck into a meeting and come back to 64 unread notes about sunscreen

When I was little, I thought hell was a fiery pit beneath the Earth’s surface. The image was vivid: flames, tortured souls and a cartoonish devil with a pitchfork.

Now that I’m an adult, I know better. Hell is actually a parent WhatsApp group.

• Felipe Contepomi called England flanker a ‘bully’

• Post-match incident follows anger over Curry tackle

Argentina have lodged a complaint and called for an investigation into the alleged tunnel scuffle involving the England flanker Tom Curry and their head coach, Felipe Contepomi, after Sunday’s game at Twickenham.

In an extraordinary press conference after England’s 27-23 victory, Contepomi described Curry as a “bully” and accused the flanker of shoving him in the tunnel and telling him to “fuck off”. Contepomi also claimed Curry had “broken” the knee of the Argentina full-back Juan Cruz Mallía with a “reckless” tackle – an incident that seemed to spark the bad blood after the final whistle.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as Novo Nordisk finds its semaglutide drug fails to help in Alzheimer’s treatment

German business morale has unexpectedly fallen this month, as companies lose hope on a recovery of the German economy following two years of contraction.

The Ifo institute has reported that its business climate index fell to 88.1 in November from 88.4 in October, weaker than expected. It’s a blow to German chancellor Friedrich Merz’s efforts to revive growth through a major spending package.

“Companies have little faith that a recovery is coming anytime soon.”

Like U2 sang almost 40 years ago: the German economy still hasn’t found what it’s looking for.

The year 2025 has been another year of hope and disappointed optimism. A year which saw excitement and enthusiasm sparked by Germany’s unprecedented fiscal policy U-turn and its decision to invest significantly in infrastructure and defence this spring. But also a year that brought a rude awakening and a cringing feeling as we watched the new government undermine the positive impact of fiscal stimulus with clumsy budgetary decisions, new political tensions, and a lack of structural reforms.

Jon M Chu’s sequel, starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, is the second biggest US opening of the year and the biggest international opening for a stage musical adaptation

The extraordinary promotional juggernaut for Wicked: For Good, Jon M Chu’s sequel to the 2024 first instalment of his Broadway adaptation, appears to have paid off, with the film this weekend smashing box office records held by its predecessor.

Its global total at the end of the weekend stands at $226m, considerably up on the $164.2m earned by its predecessor. The major change was in the domestic takings: while last year’s film took more than double its initial take in the US – $114m to $50.2m overseas – this concluding instalment has corrected that overindexing, with $76m banked from international territories.

US has used claims of a ‘war on drugs’ to justify its attacks, which have resulted in 83 deaths that the UN has called extrajudicial executions

Amid growing tensions between Washington and Caracas, the US has gathered its largest military presence in the Caribbean since the 1989 invasion of Panama.

Donald Trump’s administration has steadily increased pressure on Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, accusing him of running the “Cartel of the Suns” drug-trafficking organization, and placing a $50m bounty on his head.

Firefighters call for long-term investment and say UK is dangerously underprepared as climate crisis worsens

Wildfires have devastated more moorland, forests and fields in the UK this year than at any time since records began, putting huge pressure on the country’s fire service, figures show.

The Global Wildfire Information System estimates that by November, wildfires had burned 47,026 hectares (116,204 acres) in 2025 in the UK – the largest area in any year since monitoring began in 2012, and more than double the area burned in the record-breaking summer of 2022.

Ash clouds from Hayli Gubbi volcano sent drifting across the Red Sea toward Yemen and Oman

A volcano in Ethiopia’s north-eastern region has erupted for the first time in nearly 12,000 years, sending thick plumes of smoke up to 9 miles (14km) into the sky, and across the Red Sea toward Yemen and Oman.

The Hayli Gubbi volcano, located in Ethiopia’s Afar region about 500 miles north-east of Addis Ababa near the Eritrean border, erupted on Sunday for several hours.

Democrats’ relentless focus on affordability welcomed in a group that had been seduced by an ecosystem of hucksters

Just a few months ago, it seemed that the political landscape was changing permanently, with young people shifting right – especially young men. Democrats spun up a vortex of efforts to win them back, but they often appeared to be flailing. This month’s elections, however, told a different story.

Young men in the US face a political identity crisis. It should not be controversial to say that the world that many were promised as children has not come to fruition. Two decades of war and a turbulent economy have combined with a massively changing workforce. Young men’s disaffection should come as no real surprise.

Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He served in the Biden-Harris administration for three years

He called one a ‘piggy’ after being questioned about the files, and reacted furiously to another during a meeting with the Saudi crown prince

Since the early days of his political career, Donald Trump has been critical of the media, but in recent days his hostility has reached a new peak – particularly when it comes to questions about his association with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump invoked the phrase “piggy” – a term he has used before – to describe a female reporter on Friday, and has aggressively responded to at least one other female reporter over the past week, including threatening to revoke ABC’s license.

These excellent little puff pastries are really just a case of fill, fold and bake

These moreish little pastries are as lovely for a snack as they are for dinner, and they take just minutes to put together. I like to fill squares of pastry and fold them into little triangular puffs, but if you prefer more of a Cornish pasty look (*food writer cancelled for suggesting paneer is an appropriate pasty filling!*), by all means stamp out circles, fold into half-moons and crimp the edges.

Goalkeeper’s unorthodox tactics got in Inter captain’s head as Allegri’s side held on for all three points at San Siro

It had taken 73 minutes, and a VAR review, but Inter finally had their breakthrough in the Milan derby, the referee, Simone Sozza, pointing to the spot after he saw replays of Strahinja Pavlovic treading on Marcus Thuram’s foot inside the area. Now all that remained was for Hakan Calhanoglu to make the score 1-1.

A formality. Since arriving in Serie A, the Turkey captain had been practically automatic in these situations – scoring 27 out of 28 penalties taken for Inter and three out of three for Milan before that. Entire newspaper columns and late-night TV broadcasts were given over to analysing his infallibility, before he finally smacked one against a post in a draw at home to Napoli last year.