Stern, credited with designing 15 Central Park West, sought to design buildings that invoked pre-war splendor

Robert AM Stern, an architect who fashioned the New York City skyline with buildings that sought to invoke pre-war splendor but with modern luxury fit for billionaires and movie stars, has died at the age of 86.

Dubbed “The King of Central Park West” by Vanity Fair, Stern was credited with designing 15 Central Park West that, in 2008, was credited as being the highest-priced new apartment building in the history of New York.

Pedro Castillo was sentenced by the supreme court for trying to disband Congress and rule by decree in 2022

Peru’s supreme court on Thursday sentenced the former leftwing president Pedro Castillo to 11 years, five months and 15 days in prison for trying to disband Congress and rule by decree in December 2022.

Labelled Peru’s first poor president, the former rural schoolteacher, who had never held elected office before winning the presidency, was impeached by Congress and jailed on the same day after his attempted power grab.

The 99th annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, one of the largest in the world, dazzled crowds in Manhattan, New York, on Thursday. Thirty-two balloons, three giant balloons, 27 floats, four special units, 33 clown groups, 11 marching bands, performance groups, and music stars parade to welcome ‘Santa Claus and the holiday season’

Equality Trust study shows how House of Lords appointments, big donations and media ownership affect political decisions

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Structural corruption and the rise of “conduits for unelected power” are reshaping British politics, according to a stark report from the Equality Trust.

Unelected influence has increased over the past two decades, the report claims, driven by the growing political clout of the ultra-rich and the institutions that enable it.

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Villa cling on for the victory and go level on points with leaders Midtjylland at the top of the league phase standings. Gosh, the English side made hard work of that at the end.

Young Boys give themselves a lifeline through Monteiro but only have four more minutes of stoppage time to find an equaliser!

• Masters champion in 1979 and US Open winner in 1984

• Post-career reputation marred by remarks about Woods

• Trump pays tribute to ‘remarkable person and player’

Fuzzy Zoeller, the two-time major champion whose genial public persona was overshadowed by a racially insensitive joke about Tiger Woods that came to define the latter part of his career, has died aged 74.

No cause of death was immediately available. Brian Naugle, tournament director of the Insperity Invitational in Houston and a longtime colleague, said Zoeller’s daughter notified him of the death on Thursday.

The parallels are imperfect but, as with Michael Vaughan’s Ashes winners, hyper-aggressive cricket with a tweaked approach in the second Test is the 2025 cohort’s only chance of winning

Twenty years on, a montage of the 2005 Ashes still tingles the spine. Close your eyes and you can probably make your own, with an Embrace soundtrack if you want to be right on the nose. Chances are you’ll see Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff belting sixes with lusty abandon; Geraint Jones wheeling away after winning the epic Edgbaston Test; Ashley Giles calmly patting the winning runs at Trent Bridge; Flintoff’s messianic dismissal of Ricky Ponting at Edgbaston; Simon Jones detonating Michael Clarke’s off stump at Old Trafford.

All those moments came in England victories or winning draws. But no 2005 montage is complete without images of Ponting being cut below the eye or Justin Langer’s right elbow ballooning in real time. Both wounds were inflicted by Steve Harmison on the first morning at Lord’s, a game that Australia won emphatically by 239 runs. When the story of the series was written, those blows – and the way England duffed Australia up in the first innings – were an essential chapter.

Study finds that a week of political content can bring about a shift in views that previously would have taken three years

Small changes to the tone of posts fed to users of X can increase feelings of political polarisation as much in a week as would have historically taken at least three years, research has found.

A groundbreaking experiment to gauge the potency of Elon Musk’s social platform to increase political division found that when posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity were boosted, even barely perceptibly, in the feeds of Democrat and Republican supporters there was a large change in their unfavourable feelings towards the other side.

The NGO’s chief says last month’s ceasefire ‘risks creating a dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal’

Amnesty International has said Israel is “still committing genocide” against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, despite the ceasefire agreed last month.

The fragile, US-brokered truce between Israel and Hamas came into effect on 10 October, after two years of war.

Carriers accused of joining ‘actions of state terrorism promoted by US’ after they suspended flights to Venezuela

Venezuela has banned six international airlines, accusing them of “state terrorism” after the carriers suspended flights to the country following a warning from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Venezuela’s civil aviation authority announced late on Wednesday that Spain’s Iberia, Portugal’s Tap, Colombia’s Avianca, Chile and Brazil’s Latam, Brazil’s Gol and Turkish Airlines would have their operational permits revoked for “joining the actions of state terrorism promoted by the United States government and unilaterally suspending air commercial operations”.

UN figures show that four-fifths of the global population now live in major settlements. We’re still figuring out how to cope

Cities have existed for millennia, but their triumph is remarkably recent. As recently as 1950, only 30% of the world’s population were urban dwellers. This week, a United Nations report suggested that more than 80% of people are now urbanites, with most of those living in cities. London became the first city to reach a million inhabitants in the early 19th century. Now, almost 500 have done so.

Jakarta, with 42 million residents, has just overtaken Tokyo as the most populous of the lot; nine of the 10 largest megacities are in Asia. The UN report revealed the scale of the recent population shift to towns and cities thanks to a new, standardised measure in place of the widely varying national criteria previously used. The urbanisation rate in its 2018 report was just 55%.

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Agency warns shoppers to be vigilant online and on the high street, with counterfeit items often posing health risks

More than 8m fake and harmful toys have been seized from shops and markets across the EU in a pre-Christmas crackdown, Europol has said.

Hauls of fake dolls, building bricks, toy cars, colouring sets, cuddly toys that could pose fire hazards and educational games were removed across 26 countries.

Russian president says latest draft peace plan ‘can be basis for future agreements’ if Kyiv gives up unspecified areas

Vladimir Putin has said that the outline of a draft peace plan discussed by the US and Ukraine could serve as a basis for future negotiations to end the war – but insisted Ukraine would have to surrender territory for any deal to be possible.

“In general, we agree that this can be the basis for future agreements,” Putin said, noting that the version of the plan discussed by Washington and Kyiv in Geneva had been shared with Moscow.

• Head coach insists he has support of the club’s hierarchy

• Admits to ‘very difficult’ 10 minutes in PSV defeat

Arne Slot has vowed to “fight on” at Liverpool and insisted support from the club’s hierarchy has not wavered following the alarming Anfield defeats by Nottingham Forest and PSV Eindhoven.

The Liverpool head coach met the club’s sporting director, ­Richard Hughes, on Thursday to dissect the Champions League defeat by PSV that extended his team’s dire run to nine losses in 12 games. It is Liverpool’s worst sequence of results since an identical run in 1953-54 and has heightened the pressure on Slot before Sunday’s Premier League trip to West Ham.

Prime minister says deal ‘sets the state for an industrial transformation’, but project is likely to face wide opposition

Mark Carney has agreed an energy deal with Alberta centred on plans for a new heavy oil pipeline reaching from the province’s oil sands to the Pacific coast, a politically volatile project that is expected to face stiff opposition.

“It’s a great day for Alberta and a great day for Canada,” the prime minister said on Thursday as he met the Alberta premier, Danielle Smith. He said the agreement “sets the state for an industrial transformation” and involved not just a pipeline, but nuclear power and datacentres. “This is Canada working,” he said.

State department has told employees and grant recipients to not publicly promote or make event on 1 December

For the first time since 1988, the US government will no longer commemorate World Aids Day, according to reports.

The state department has directed its employees and grant recipients not to use US government funds to mark the event – which falls annually on 1 December – and not to promote the day publicly. The news was first reported by the journalist Emily Bass and confirmed in an email viewed by the New York Times.

Global Counsel signed $3m contract with WuXi AppTec in Europe months after it was named in US national security drive

Global Counsel, the lobbying firm co-founded by Peter Mandelson, was brought in to advise the Chinese pharmaceutical company WuXi AppTec in Europe months after it was targeted in a US national security crackdown.

WuXi AppTec signed a $3m contract with Global Counsel last year to deal with the international fallout from claims that it had links with the Chinese military and was implicated in human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Liverpool have dropped to 12th in the table – matching the lowest finish by reigning Premier League champions

By WhoScored

Six defeats in 12 top-flight games is not just a wobble. It’s one of the worst starts ever made by defending Premier League champions. The last team to begin their title defence this badly was Leicester City in 2016-17. They finished 12th that season – where Liverpool are now – with Claudio Ranieri sacked midway through the campaign. The same fate befell José Mourinho at Chelsea in the 2015-16 season. They started with seven defeats in 12 games, a collapse so severe that Mourinho was shown the door a week before Christmas. For Liverpool and Arne Slot, the warning signs could not be clearer.

The transformation from champions to chaos has been stark. Just six months ago, Slot was heralded as a record breaker, the man who had taken on the unenviable task of replacing club legend Jürgen Klopp and done it with apparent ease. Under his guidance, Liverpool clinched the title with four games to spare, an achievement only three other teams have managed. Slot became the third-youngest manager to win the Premier League, the fifth to win it in his first season in England and, most importantly, he brought the title to Anfield for just the second time in 35 years.

Charles Stanish surmised indentations were rudimentary market place and later adapted as accounting and storage system

A Florida archaeologist’s decades-long persistence has helped solve one of Peru’s most puzzling geographical conundrums: the origin and purpose of the so-called Band of Holes in the country’s mountainous Pisco Valley.

Charles Stanish, professor of archaeology at the University of South Florida, and an expert on Andean culture, spent years studying the more than 5,200 curious hillside shallow pits known to local residents as Monte Sierpe - serpent mountain.

Three construction employees arrested as firefighters battle to reach trapped people, with more than 250 still missing

• Hong Kong fire – latest updates

• How the fire unfolded – visual guide

Hong Kong police have alleged unsafe scaffolding and foam materials used during maintenance work may have been behind the rapid spread of a devastating fire at a group of residential tower blocks that has killed at least 83 people and left more than 250 missing.

Firefighters were still battling to reach people who could be trapped on the upper floors of the Wang Fuk Court housing complex on Thursday due to the intense heat and thick smoke generated by the fire. Late in the day, a survivor was rescued from a stairway on the 16th floor of one of the towers, the South China Morning Post reported.

JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs reveal plans for London and Birmingham as sector is spared tax rises

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Two of Wall Street’s biggest banks have announced substantial expansion plans in the UK, hours after they were spared increased taxes in Rachel Reeves’s autumn budget.

JP Morgan on Thursday revealed plans to build a 3m sq ft tower in Canary Wharf, which will serve as its new UK headquarters and house more than half of its 23,000 UK staff. It is understood the London project will cost £3bn.

Amazon Web Services owns the basic infrastructure for other businesses to operate online, turning even governments into its serfs. But now some people are fighting back

For the past six years, every Black Friday – that made-up carnival of consumption – Amazon workers and their allies have mobilised across the world in coordinated strikes and protests. At first glance, these disputes look like the standard struggle between a giant capitalist employer and the people who keep it running. But Amazon is no ordinary corporation. It is the clearest expression of what I call technofeudalism: a new economic order in which platforms behave like lords owning the fiefs that have replaced markets.

To appreciate Amazon’s extraordinary power, we must recall the system it is helping to bury. Capitalism relied on markets and profit. Firms invested in productive capital, hired workers, produced commodities and lived or died by profit and loss. But the emerging order is one in which the most powerful capitalist firms have exited that market altogether. They own the digital infrastructure that everyone else must use to trade, work, communicate and live.

Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25 and the author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

• Week 13: Detroit 24-31 Green Bay; Love throws 4 TDs

• Dallas v Kansas City starts at 9.30pm GMT, 3.30pm local

Lions 0-3 Packers 4:01, 1st quarter

That sack Goff didn’t take on 3rd down in the previous drive, he just took it on this one. Green Bay’s defensive line is dominating so far. Micah Parsons and Kingsley Enagbare share the QB takedown. Punt.

Fashion designer whose idiosyncratic mix of glam and DIY couture was worn by Björk, Siouxsie Sioux and Taylor Swift

The designer Pam Hogg stayed faithful for life to the principles, practices, provocations and politics of the art school, music and club scene of her youth around 1980. The fashion industry metamorphosed over the decades since, but she went on believing in individuality and drama, painstakingly achieved. Debbie Harry, Siouxsie Sioux, Rihanna, Björk, Lady Gaga, Lily Allen, Kylie Minogue and Taylor Swift, among others, bought her garments, which were auditorium-dominating mixes of sex, eccentricity and intellect. Hogg’s catsuits in Latex and PVC became the glam workwear of the rock and pop stage. They never dated. When a star strides on stage in one, the audience knows the action is about to kick off.

Yet to the end of her life, Hogg, who has died, aged perhaps 66 (she refused to reveal her age publicly), remained a struggling artist. She hoped to arrive at the same safe destination as her long-term friend Vivienne Westwood, with an atelier equipped with pattern cutter and couture seamstresses, plus financial backing for a ready-to-wear line that would not betray her nonconforming philosophy of dress.