Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov says other parts of plan, which has not been published, ‘require special discussions among experts’

In case you missed it, US president Donald Trump defended his peace envoy Steve Witkoff overnight after Bloomberg reported that he allegedly advised Putin’s aide Ushakov on how to speak with Trump and conduct the talks.

Trump did not appear too bothered by it, though.

Kevin McCarthy says exit of the Trump loyalist turned critic is a sign of broader trouble for Republicans

CNN is reporting that the mother of Karoline Leavitt’s 11-year-old nephew is in ICE custody after having been arrested earlier this month.

Bruna Caroline Ferreira, a Brazilian native, was arrested near Boston on 12 November as she was on her way to pick up her son, her attorney, Todd Pomerleau, told CNN.

“[They] did a hit piece on me that I am perhaps losing my Energy, despite facts that show the exact opposite.

“There will be a day when I run low on Energy, it happens to everyone, but with a PERFECT PHYSICAL EXAM AND A COMPREHENSIVE COGNITIVE TEST (“That was aced”) JUST RECENTLY TAKEN, it certainly is not now!”

French thriller starring Benoît Magimel has been accused of stealing its story from a 1976 action film

A new Apple TV thriller has been pulled from the schedules because of accusations of plagiarism. French drama The Hunt was due to be released on 3 December, but it has been hit by allegations of similarity to a 1976 film adaptation of a novel, Shoot.

The Hunt stars Cannes and three-time César award winner Benoît Magimel and two-time César winner Mélanie Laurent, who has featured in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. But press releases about The Hunt, as well as its official trailers, have now been removed from Apple’s site.

Rex is an uber-macho hunter who, together with four equally testosterone-addled buddies, embarks on a hunting trip in the Canadian wilderness. But their weekend is cut short by a rival band of hunters they encounter in the forest, one of whom inexplicably takes a potshot at Rex’s party and grazes the head of one of his buddies. Another of Rex’s friends returns fire, killing the shooter. From there Rex and company scurry off and head back to civilisation. Rex, however, becomes convinced that the dead man’s companions are going to come after him and his friends.

Former French president only released from prison earlier this month in connection with separate conviction

The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been convicted of illegal campaign financing in his failed 2012 re-election bid, after the country’s highest court rejected his final appeal.

Sarkozy, who was the country’s rightwing president between 2007 and 2012, was convicted of hiding illegal overspending for his unsuccessful re-election campaign that was shaped by vast American-style rallies.

Criminal exploitation, economic opportunism and religious persecution are all factors in a broader picture of insecurity

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“If they explain Nigeria to you and you understand it, they didn’t explain it well enough”. So goes the maxim for trying to parse Nigeria’s labyrinthine political dynamics. A security crisis has engulfed the country, catching the attention of the US president in the process. With the help of our West Africa correspondent, Eromo Egbejule, I’ll try to get to the bottom of what is happening.

• Slovenian reignites rivalry with Clippers’ Kris Dunn

• Donçić narrowly misses 40-point triple double

Luka Donçić was unhappy with the special NBA Cup court at the Los Angeles Lakers’ downtown arena, calling it “slippery” and “dangerous.”

The Slovenian superstar was much happier about the Lakers’ togetherness and toughness after Jaxson Hayes stuck up for him in his latest confrontation with Kris Dunn – and he plans to pay Hayes’s fine for the resulting technical foul.

Prime minister says Reform leader’s explanations about alleged comments are ‘unconvincing to say the least’

Keir Starmer has called on Nigel Farage to apologise to his school contemporaries who claim the Reform leader racially abused them while at Dulwich College.

The Guardian reported last week the testimony of Peter Ettedgui, who said a 13-year-old Farage “would sidle up to me and growl: ‘Hitler was right’ or ‘gas them’, sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers”.

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

It has been weeks since the ground opened up under Malcolm McKenzie’s prized Mini, leading him into a bureaucratic ‘nightmare’

The first Malcolm McKenzie knew of his problem was when a neighbour banged on his door and told him his beloved Mini had fallen into a hole.

“I went out expecting a small pothole under a wheel or something. But when I went out to take a look, I realised, oh, that really is a proper hole,” he said.

Barbican Hall, London
From ghost-story minimalism to wartime memory, Rani’s two new works, premiered here, shimmer with imagination, although issues of balance diminished the piano concerto

In a crowded post-minimalist world, Hania Rani has carved herself out a respectable niche. The Polish pianist and composer’s erudite yet accessible work often defies genres, appealing to classical, jazz and electronic aficionados alike. This concert comprised two 40-minute premieres and fell pretty firmly into the classical category, yet the lively audience skewed significantly younger than the Brahms and Beethoven crowd. Stylishly performed by the envelope-pushing Manchester Collective, it felt like quite the happening.

Shining occupied the first half, a piece devised for the kind of 12-piece band favoured by Steve Reich and Philip Glass. It’s based on a short story by Jon Fosse; a stream of consciousness tale of a man lost in the woods at night. Opening with sinister discords on bass clarinet, bassoon and horn, its motifs shifted and spun. A pall of smoke and half-lit players conjured images of a ghost story told around a campfire at midnight.

Human rights monitors say it is not safe to return, citing reports of ‘serious crimes in the run-up to elections’

Myanmar’s junta applauded the Trump administration on Wednesday for halting a scheme that protected its citizens from deportation from the US back to their war-racked homeland.

About 4,000 Myanmar citizens are living in the US with temporary protected status (TPS), which shields foreign nationals from deportation to disaster zones and allows them the right to work.

Israeli military and security service say ‘broad counter-terrorism operation’ in Tubas to continue for several days

Hundreds of Israeli soldiers supported by armoured vehicles have conducted raids in the Palestinian town of Tubas near Nablus in the biggest such military deployment by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank since the ceasefire came into effect in Gaza last month.

Palestinian media reported that a curfew was imposed on Tuesday night on Tubas and some neighbouring communities, roads were closed by earthen barriers and families forced from their homes to allow Israeli forces to use the buildings.

Paul Doyle, who drove into a crowd of celebrating football fans in May, changes plea unexpectedly

A former Royal Marine has pleaded guilty on the first day of his trial to injuring 29 people, including two babies, by ploughing his car through the crowd at a Liverpool FC victory parade.

Paul Doyle, 54, deliberately drove his Ford Galaxy at football fans after tailgating an ambulance down a packed road that was closed to non-emergency service vehicles on 26 May.

She and her husband seem keen on their titles and accolades, and less enthusiastic about putting in the work that ordinarily goes with them

Meghan may be a resident of Montecito, California, but she is still the Duchess of Sussex, and she won’t let us commoners forget it. Despite their highly publicised separation from the royal family, Harry and Meghan remain extraordinarily loyal to their fancy titles. They have been asked before why they cling to their aristocratic honorifics and shrugged off the question. “What difference would that make?” Harry told Anderson Cooper in 2023, when asked why the couple didn’t renounce the titles.

The difference, Mr Duke, is that people might stop wondering why you and Megs are so keen on reminding everyone that you’re royals, while living in a country that famously has no monarchy. And this question isn’t going away. It keeps popping up and it’s back in the news now thanks to a Harper’s Bazaar cover story on Meghan.

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Trump has suggested on at least 28 occasions over past eight years that a national TV network’s license be revoked – even though it doesn’t work that way

Facing aggressive questioning from Mary Bruce, an ABC News White House correspondent, about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, Donald Trump last week suggested a form of punishment he thought would be appropriate for her “crappy company”: the Federal Communications Commission should revoke ABC’s license, the US president declared.

It wasn’t the first time he has done so. As he has sought redress for what he has considered to be unfair reporting about him and his administration, Trump has suggested at least 28 times over the last eight years that a television network should lose its license, according to analysis by the Guardian.

Underpowered David Michôd film fails to land the story of the groundbreaking 90s female boxing champion and the horrendous abuse she faced at home

An uninspired and undirected performance from Sydney Sweeney means there’s a fatal lack of force in this movie from director and co-writer David Michôd. It manages to be unsubtle without being powerful. His subject is Christy Salters Martin, who under the grinning tutelage of Don King became the world’s most successful female boxing champion in the 90s and 00s but faced a misogynist nightmare outside the ring.

The film fails to deliver the power of the traditional boxing movie, or the real importance of a story about domestic abuse and coercive control, or the sensory detail of true crime. It relies on the simple fact of a woman pioneeringly taking on what had once been solely a man’s sport and relapses into cliche. Christy, with her frizzy hair and brown contact lenses, doesn’t seem to plausibly develop as a character throughout the film, and it sometimes seems as if Michôd is slightly more engaged with her gargoyle of a husband-slash-manager Jim Martin, played by Ben Foster with a standard-issue combover and paunch.

National news organizations have treated the borough like flyover country. It’s time to change that

As the extraordinary Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani shows, there’s a new bellwether in American politics.

For years, Ohio played that role. In every election from 1964 to 2016, the state voted for the winning presidential candidate, and every four years journalists would travel there to interview voters in Columbus and Cincinnati, Dayton and Youngstown. But in 2020 Biden won without carrying the state, and today Ohio is deeply red, costing it its bellwether status. Several other states once considered battlegrounds – Iowa, Missouri, and Florida – have also turned firmly Republican.

Michael Massing is an American writer based in New York City. He is a former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review

Eke out that last stubborn scrape of Marmite and turn it into a dream glaze for crisp roast potatoes

I never peel a roastie, because boiling potatoes with their skins on, then cracking them open, gives you the best of both worlds: fluffy insides and golden, craggy edges. Especially when you finish roasting them in a glaze made with butter (or, even better, saved chicken, pork, beef or goose fat) and the last scrapings from a Marmite jar.

Millions of sexual violent survivors will not live a day longer with this torturous injustice

It began as I finished Nobody’s Girl, the torturous and devastating account of Virginia Giuffre’s life. It was what I can only describe as a kind of corporeal attack, an existential clutch followed by days of such powerful anxiety my body was taken in bouts of uncontrollable shaking. A sense of not mattering, a virulent dread and dissolving into an all-encompassing nothingness impossible to shake. How many times as a child, after being abused by my father, had I experienced this sense of erasure and disappearance?

Feeling that no matter what I did, what I accomplished, how hard I tried to lift my head above the parapet I would be cast out forever. This attack lasted days. Perhaps it was Virginia’s story, parts of which felt much like my own. Raped as a child by her father, then raped by her father’s good friend, then raped when she ran away, then the years of being raped by Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, then being sexually trafficked to powerful and sadistic men to be raped again.

The final remains curious in a Celtic context because it is the showpiece occasion the club would rather forget

It feels cruel in part to use Thursday’s meeting of Feyenoord and Celtic to reflect upon illustrious times. The Dutch side are 29th in the 36-team Europa League table, with Celtic’s position in 27th only more slightly more palatable to supporters because Rangers are bottom of the pile.

Those fans disrupted an annual general meeting to the point of abandonment last week, demonstrating the disharmony that has engulfed Celtic for months. A club that progressed to the Champions League’s knockout phase playoffs last season, looking an overdue but serious European force, have starkly regressed. Celtic have the spending power to outshine clubs who routinely embarrass them in a bigger pond than St Mirren and Motherwell occupy.

Several people reportedly trapped inside burning towers as firefighters tackle huge blaze in Tai Po district

At least 13 people have died after fire engulfed several high-rise towers of a residential complex in Hong Kong’s northern Tai Po district, with thick grey smoke billowing out as emergency services tackled the blaze.

Police said several people remained trapped inside the burning towers, while two people were in a critical condition with severe burns.

Gulf nation is accused of placing monitoring software on computers of two dissidents living in London

Bahrain is to tell the UK’s supreme court that it enjoys sovereign immunity from claims it placed surveillance software on the computers of two dissidents when they were living in London.

The Gulf country has lost the sovereign immunity claim both in the high court and court of appeal, and a decision to take the case further to the supreme court shows how important it is to the country’s reputation.

As the government, Marineland of Canada and activists remain at loggerheads over whales’ fate, health and freedom of beloved animals hangs in balance

Jelly Bean’s son Bertie Botts is an adorable little “ham sandwich”. Orion – nicknamed “Onion Ring” – is a large but fiercely protective friend. Zephyr has “ants in his pants” and wiggles like a worm. Lillooet is the “biggest cuddle bug” with a heart of gold.

Thirty captive beluga whales in a Canadian amusement park have become pawns in a tussle between a shuttered park, local and national governments and animal rights activists.

Music company representing Coldplay and Ed Sheeran had sued tech platform alleging mass copyright infringement

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Warner Music has signed a licensing deal with the artificial intelligence song generator Suno after settling a copyright infringement lawsuit it launched against the service a year ago

Warner, the world’s third-largest music company and home to acts including Coldplay, Charli XCX and Ed Sheeran, is the first of the major record labels to partner officially with the company.