Iranian film-maker won Cannes film festival’s Palme D’Or prize earlier this year for It Was Just an Accident
Iran has sentenced the Palme d’Or-winning film-maker Jafar Panahi in absentia to one year in prison and a travel ban over “propaganda activities” against the country.
The sentence includes a two-year ban on leaving Iran and prohibition of Panahi from membership of any political or social groups, his lawyer Mostafa Nili said, adding that they would file an appeal.
Demonstrators blocked the exit of ICE vehicles from a parking lot using garbage bags and metal barriers
A raid by federal immigration authorities on Saturday in New York City was thwarted by about 200 protesters, several of whom were arrested after scuffles with police officers.
The episode was the latest in which citizen activists have stood up to agents enforcing Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda through targeted raids in various cities across the country after his second presidency began in January.
Red Bull driver can win fifth world title in Abu Dhabi
Dutchman was 104 points behind top after Dutch GP
Max Verstappen is fired-up to go to Abu Dhabi and compete for his fifth F1 world championship after the Dutchman won in Qatar, narrowed the gap to 12 points within the championship leader, Lando Norris and overtook Oscar Piastri to set up a three-way season-deciding finale at the Yas Marina circuit.
Manuel Pellegrini’s team had key players missing but still enjoyed a first triumph at the Sánchez-Pizjuán since 2018
“What can I say?” Pablo Fornals said, “really nice”. Mostly, in truth, it hadn’t been, but it was in the moment when he had illuminated everything, taking Batista Mendy, César Azpilicueta and Kike Salas out for a walk – first this way, then that – and it was now, the 144th Seville derby finally ending 20 minutes behind schedule and with a Real Betis win.
“You dream of playing games like this, just playing them,” Fornals said as high in the south-east corner of the Ramón Sánchez-Pizjuán Stadium, 600 supporters in green sang, adding: “so to score and win, well, me, my teammates, all those lunatics up there and back home, you can imagine how happy we are”.
Critics voice concern as government says its Sanchar Saathi app combats cybersecurity threats for 1.2bn telecom users
India’s telecoms ministry has privately asked smartphone makers to preload all new devices with a state-owned cybersecurity app that cannot be deleted, a government order showed, a move likely to antagonise Apple and privacy advocates.
In tackling a recent surge of cybercrime and hacking, India is joining authorities worldwide, most recently in Russia, to frame rules blocking the use of stolen phones for fraud or promoting state-backed government service apps.
The FBI director, Kash Patel, is “in over his head” and leading a “chronically under-performing” agency paralyzed by fear and plummeting morale, according to a scathing 115-page report compiled by a national alliance of retired and active-duty FBI special agents and analysts.
The leaked assessment, obtained by the New York Post and prepared for both congressional Senate and House judiciary committees, is based on confidential accounts from 24 FBI sources.
Habba disqualified from serving as New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor, appeals court says
Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Alina Habba, whom his administration has maneuvered to keep in place as New Jersey top federal prosecutor, is disqualified from serving in the role, an appeals court said Monday.
A panel of judges from the third US circuit court of appeals sitting in Philadelphia sided with a lower court judge’s ruling after hearing oral arguments at which Habba herself was present on 20 October.
Rufus Sewell, Christine Baranski, Susan Wokoma, Toby Jones and Harriet Walter share their unforgettable encounters with a theatrical giant
I worked with Tom when I was quite young, on Arcadia in 1993, and again on Rock’n’Roll 13 years later. In the interim it slowly dawned on me that not all jobs were like that. He was one of the most intelligent people you could ever meet but the extraordinary thing was that you’d walk away from conversations with him feeling like you were not unintelligent or unwitty yourself. That’s not always the case with incredibly brilliant writers and funny people. That generosity of spirit marked my time with him. He was incredibly good company, very sweet, and you felt encouraged to put forward your own ideas, make your own jokes.
Ukraine will top agenda, but meeting comes as positive sentiment towards Germany in Poland hits near record lows
When the Polish and German governments meet on Monday for annual political talks in Berlin – the first since Friedrich Merz became chancellor – the headlines are likely to be dominated by Ukraine.
Amid growing US pressure for a peace deal with Russia, Warsaw and Berlin will want to send a signal of support for Kyiv and of unity between central Europe’s largest – and militarily strongest – countries.
Site removes feature after real estate agents and some homeowners say scores appear arbitrary and hurt sales
Zillow, the US’s largest real estate listing site, has removed a feature that allowed people to view a property’s exposure to the climate crisis, following complaints from the industry and some homeowners that it was hurting sales.
In September last year, the online real estate marketplace introduced a tool showing the individual risk of wildfire, flood, extreme heat, wind and poor air quality for one million properties it lists, explaining that “climate risks are now a critical factor in home-buying decisions” for many Americans.
Pedro Inzunza Coronel, alias ‘El Pichón’, was killed during an anti-drug operation by the Mexican navy in Sinaloa
Mexican authorities have killed one of the country’s top fentanyl traffickers, accused of importing tens of thousands of kilos of the drug into the US and wanted by the US authorities on narco-terrorism charges.
Pedro Inzunza Coronel, alias “El Pichón”, (The Pigeon) was killed on Sunday during an anti-drug operation by the Mexican navy in the north-western state of Sinaloa.
Eben Etzebeth is expected to appear at a disciplinary hearing on Tuesday after his red card for alleged eye-gouging in the dominant victory against Wales on Saturday, with the Springboks lock potentially facing a long ban. The verdict is likely to be announced on Wednesday.
As South Africa closed in on a record 73-0 victory in Cardiff, Etzebeth clashed with the Welsh back-rower Alex Mann, appearing to make contact with his opponent’s left eye in a fracas involving several players from both sides.
He was a Latin American president accused of colluding with some of the region’s most ruthless narco bosses to flood the United States with cocaine.
“[Let’s] stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,” the double-dealing politician once allegedly bragged as he lined his pockets with millions of dollars in bribes and turned his country into what many called a narco-state.
Left-leaning challengers in the Rust belt are throwing chaos into a divided party struggling to rebuild after Trump’s win
In the run-up to last month’s mayoral election in Dayton, Ohio, candidate Shenise Turner-Sloss found herself up against it.
Her opponent, mayor Jeffrey Mims, was a 78-year-old local Democratic party doyen who had served on school boards and teachers’ unions in the city for decades. His campaign budget was three times hers and an incumbent hadn’t been unseated from the mayoral role in the city for over a decade.
Reaction to goalkeeper’s error on Saturday was reprehensible but fans have had enough of being let down by the team
In my 35 years as a Tottenham fan, 15 of them as a season‑ticket holder, I’ve seen the home atmosphere turn ugly more than a few times. Chants of “We want our Tottenham back” have resurfaced during times of struggle, while mounting fury at Daniel Levy finally grew too loud to ignore for the Lewis family over the summer.
I remember well the chorus of boos that ultimately sounded the death knell for Nuno Espírito Santo, when he subbed off a lively Lucas Moura against Manchester United. And if you want a deeper cut, I was there in May 2007 to witness the visceral anger and disgust when Hossam Ghaly threw his shirt on the ground after being substituted by Martin Jol, half an hour after coming on.
A backer of Eleanor the Great, about a woman who pretends to be a Holocaust survivor, dropped out after Johansson refused to make changes
Scarlett Johansson has said she was pressed to remove Holocaust references in her feature directing debut Eleanor the Great, which stars June Squibb as an elderly woman who pretends to be a Holocaust survivor.
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Johansson said that during the film’s pre-production phase, one of the film’s backers threatened to pull out unless the plot elements relating to the Holocaust were cut out.
An official confirmed nearly a dozen deaths, including a mother and her child, in Artibonite region over the weekend
Heavily armed gangs attacked Haiti’s central region over the weekend, killing men, women and children as they set fire to homes and forced survivors to flee into the darkness.
Police made emergency calls for backup, asserting that 50% of the Artibonite region had fallen under gang control after the large-scale attacks targeting towns including Bercy and Pont-Sondé.
Richard Hughes takes ‘full responsibility’ for watchdog error as Starmer attempts to secure chancellor’s position
The chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility has resigned after a damning internal inquiry into the leak that threw Rachel Reeves’s budget into chaos described it as the “worst failure” in the institution’s history.
The departure of Richard Hughes, who said he took “full responsibility” for the watchdog’s failure to handle sensitive information, dragged the rolling recriminations over the budget into a fifth day.
‘Rage bait’ is Oxford word of the year in 2025. But I think we should be able to decommission words that have brought more trouble than they’re worth, starting with the 2015 runner-up
The Oxford word of the year has been chosen, and it’s “rage bait”. It was a close-run contest with “aura farming” – that just means charisma, for which a number of perfectly fine words already exist – and “biohack”, a non-specific lifestyle improvement in which you’ve somehow got into the mainframe of time itself, and made some aspect of your body immune to its ravages. Since “aura farming” is extraneous and “biohacks” are almost all bollocks, the competition can’t have been that close, but the neologism isn’t necessarily welcome.
Rage bait, as you probably already know, is the publication, usually online, of material designed to make people angry. It’s not a made-up phenomenon; we’ve known for some time that online engagement is most strongly driven by out-group animosity, but nor is it a cute feature of modern life, like iced matcha lattes and Labubus. It creates intellectual silos, drives deep social divisions, and ultimately corrodes trust in institutions and reason itself, as people feel so alienated from any but their own tribe that they cease to believe anything except word of mouth. I’d argue that it’s a bit like making “ethnic cleansing” your word of 1992, during the Bosnian war. Yes, people were using it a lot, but that didn’t make it a fun answer for a quiz. Turns out it was named Un-Word of the year by the GfdS (society for spoken German), which deplored its euphemistic nature. And that is fair. Anyway, good luck in the dictionary business, Oxford, if you collude to make rage bait all the rage. Your alphabetical list of meanings isn’t going to get anyone’s dander up.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Uncredited vocals on song I Run by British dance act Haven alleged to infringe copyright as impersonation of Smith
Jorja Smith’s record label has called for a share of the royalties from a TikTok-viral song that it claims used an AI-cloned version of the British singer’s voice.
The song I Run, by British dance act Haven, went viral in October and was due to chart in the UK and the US after reaching No 11 on the US Spotify chart and No 25 on the platform’s global chart.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, has said she fears talks between the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, will pile pressure on Ukraine to make concessions with the two men expected to meet on Tuesday.
Following every dizzying spin of Chalamet’s table tennis hustler, Josh Safdie’s whip-crack comedy serves sensational shots – and a smart return by Gwyneth Paltrow
This new film from Josh Safdie has the fanatical energy of a 149-minute ping pong rally carried out by a single player running round and round the table. It’s a marathon sprint of gonzo calamities and uproar, a sociopath-screwball nightmare like something by Mel Brooks – only in place of gags, there are detonations of bad taste, cinephile allusions, alpha cameos, frantic deal-making, racism and antisemitism, sentimental yearning and erotic adventures. It’s a farcical race against time where no one needs to eat or sleep.
Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a spindly motormouth with the glasses of an intellectual, the moustache of a movie star and the physique of a tiny cartoon character. He’s loosely inspired by Marty “The Needle” Reisman, a real-life US table tennis champ from the 1950s who was given to Bobby Riggs-type shenanigans: betting, hustling and showmanship stunts. The movie probably earns the price of admission simply with one gasp-inducing setpiece involving whippet-thin Chalamet, a dog, a bathtub, cult director Abel Ferrara in a walk-on role and a scuzzy New York hotel room. Talk about not being on firm ground. Similarly disorientating is the climactic revelation of Chalamet’s naked buttocks prior to one of the most upsetting displays of corporal punishment since Lindsay Anderson’s If….
Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments
I finally got round to Thoreau’s Journal. It is determinedly down-to-earth and soaring, lyrical and belligerent, humane and cantankerous. Walt Whitman thought Thoreau suffered from “a very aggravated case of superciliousness”, but as Walt also said (of himself) the Journal of this brooding, solitary figure is great; it “contains multitudes.”
Homework by Geoff Dyer is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson is published by Cassava Republic. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Group beaten in early hours of morning in village where they volunteered to help protect Palestinians from settler violence
Italy and Canada have raised concerns about the treatment of their citizens who were beaten and robbed by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.
Three Italians and a Canadian were attacked early on Sunday morning in the village of Ein al-Duyuk, near Jericho, where they had volunteered to help protect the Palestinian population from intensifying settler violence.