Group that includes congressional leaders and leading intelligence committee members is traditionally briefed on major national security actions

Trump concluded his interview with Politico with some musings on the future leadership of the Republican party. Asked if anyone in the party could energise such a wide coalition as he had, Trump said:

I hope so. I don’t know. You never know until they’re tested. You know, it’s like, uh, you jump in the water; you can swim or you can’t.

Uh, well, it looked like they were trying to turn back over the boat, but I don’t get involved in that. That’s up to them.

And we’re gonna hit ’em on land very soon, too.

Accounts held by users under 16 must be removed on apps that include TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Kick, Twitch and Threads under ban

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Australia has enacted a world-first ban on social media for users aged under 16, causing millions of children and teenagers to lose access to their accounts.

Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Kick, Twitch and TikTok are expected to have taken steps from Wednesday to remove accounts held by users under 16 years of age in Australia, and prevent those teens from registering new accounts.

Charles Poekel’s directorial debut has taken a decade to reach the UK, but its indie take on seasonal cinema brings low-key warmth

This is a New York drama so laidback that it has taken a decade to reach the UK’s cinema screens. First released in the US in 2015, it’s an ultra-low-budget debut from first-time director Charles Poekel, set almost entirely on a 24-hour pop-up Christmas tree stall. Poekel’s style is far too authentic-indie and unaffected to get slushy or sentimental about Christmas; through his lens Christmas tree lights blink like police lights. But in its own low-key way, he pitches his film just right for a little squeeze of festive warmth.

Kentucker Audley stars as Noel (it took someone in the film to joke about his name before I twigged). Noel is back for his fifth year selling Christmas trees in Brooklyn, standing outside in the freezing cold and sleeping in a not-much-warmer caravan parked next to the trees. A few customers ask about the girl working with him last year. But this year Noel is alone, broken-hearted and working the night shift. There’s a documentary feel to a lot of the scenes, customers asking pointless random questions. One woman wants the same Christmas tree as the Obamas (this is 2014). Noel looks frozen to the bone physically and emotionally; he’s weary and disillusioned, though Audley’s subtle performance makes it clear that he wasn’t always like this.

Three proposed casinos approved as researchers say they take money from businesses and increase addiction

New York City will probably soon see three new casinos, whose owners could rake in profits because of a recent surge in gambling in the United States that has some campaigners worried.

The New York gaming facility location board this week approved three proposed casinos in the US’s largest city – two in Queens and one in the Bronx – after determining the businesses would create new jobs and generate billions in tax revenue, according to the group’s report.

Their relatives might have been on opposite sides of near-nuclear war, but the US and Soviet leader’s descendants have teamed up for an intimate BBC podcast. They talk humanity, hate – and why Trump is a ‘very limited’ man

In October 1962, the world came closer to destruction than at any other point in modern times. After a US surveillance plane discovered that Soviet nuclear missile sites were being built in Cuba, less than 100 miles from the US mainland, President John F Kennedy responded by ordering the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet to impose a naval blockade around the island. Almost two weeks of impossible tension followed.

The threat was clear. If Kennedy, or his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, fired on their enemy, a chain reaction of global nuclear strikes and counterstrikes would have followed, plunging humanity into all-out ruination.

The second year of London’s Armenian film festival reflects country in flux as legacy of recent conflict with Azerbaijan hangs over attempts to strengthen ties with the west

There is a point during Tamara Stepanyan’s My Armenian Phantoms when the documentary cuts to the final scene of the 1980 Soviet film, A Piece of Sky, in which the orphaned lead character, joyfully rides a horse and cart through the town that had long shunned him and the sex worker he married as social outcasts.

A flock of birds are then framed gliding through the pristine blue sky above. It’s a sequence depicting the desire to overcome the forces that seek to limit and constrain which lay at the heart of the director Henrik Malyan’s new wave critique.

In an exclusive interview the younger Chawinga sister talks about missing her older sibling Tabitha, her hopes for Malawi and life at Kansas City Current

Kansas City Current’s Temwa Chawinga has doubled up as the NWSL’s top scorer and MVP for the second year in a row – just two years after Tabitha, her elder sister and mentor, was the Golden Boot winner with Internazionale in Italy’s Serie A Femminile. It is no exaggeration to describe the duo, from Malawi, as football’s equivalent of the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena.

“I hope Temwa and I get to meet them someday,” Tabitha says of the tennis legends. Now with French side OL Lyonnes, the 29-year-old insists that her younger sibling will have a more distinguished career despite setting an extremely high bar in the Swedish, Chinese and Italian leagues, in which Chawinga has won several Golden Boot and MVP awards.

The reporter’s affair with Robert F Kennedy Jr raised a whole host of questions, few of which get answers in this pretentious memoir

Did he take me seriously?” Olivia Nuzzi wonders in the midst of her infamous affair with Robert F Kennedy Jr. Nuzzi, then Washington correspondent for New York magazine, has just learned that she and the Politician, as she calls RFK in her new book, may overlap during a visit to Mar-a-Lago. Nuzzi, worried Donald Trump will catch on to the relationship and start spreading rumours, convenes an emergency meeting with the Politician to strategise. RFK doesn’t see the big deal.

So, she agonises “Did he take me seriously?” and reflects that she had “little cause to consider the question before now.”

The former world No 1 shares how a traumatic year has shaped him as a darts player and a father and insists he can recapture his glory days at the world championship

“I can be a miserable bastard sometimes,” Michael van Gerwen says with a grin and a shrug as he tries to explain his new burst of optimism after a horribly testing year. “But I can also be quite positive. If you asked me this question a month ago, and we did this interview then, you would find me a bit different to today. But I feel good now even if, 100%, this has been a very tough year for me both on and off the oche.”

Rather than being miserable, the 36-year-old is amiable company – which seems remarkable as in 2025 he has been through a divorce after 17 years with his wife, Daphne, witnessed the devastating effect of cancer on his father, endured intense scrutiny in the Dutch media, and struggled to regain his once imperious form with the arrows.

Day-Lewis, who suggested Dano for his part in There Will Be Blood, praised the actor, as did Ben Stiller and Batman director Matt Reeves

Paul Dano’s There Will Be Blood co-star Daniel Day-Lewis has defended the actor after he was criticised by Quentin Tarantino.

The director took issue with Dano’s talents while discussing his list of the best films of the century on Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast. Tarantino said he would have moved Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 drama higher than No 5 had a different actor played preacher Eli Sunday.

Men charged with robbery and administering noxious substance over incident at London airport on Sunday

Two men have been charged with robbery and administering a noxious substance after more than 20 people were affected by what was thought to be pepper spray at Heathrow airport.

Tyrone Richards, 31, and Anton Clarke-Butcher, 24, are due to appear at Uxbridge magistrates court on Tuesday.

Residents say incursions and raids have increased since forces first entered country a year ago after fall of Assad

On the day Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell, Abu Ibrahim and his family went to sleep wondering what sort of future awaited them in the morning. They woke in a panic, to the sound of gunfire and tanks.

The bullets announced the arrival of the Israeli military into the remote southern Syrian province of Quneitra on 9 December 2024. In the place of Assad militias who used to patrol the roads, bulky armoured personnel carriers filled with Israeli soldiers rumbled down the potholed streets, stopping to assure residents that they were there for their protection.

Yesterday’s Golden Globes announcement was a masterclass in mispronunciation that threatens to undo every effort to internationalise awards. Why can’t producers just make their presenters practise?

The day after an awards show announces its nominations, the focus typically falls on the nominees. However, yesterday’s Golden Globe nominations were a little different, because all anyone can talk about is how badly the actor Marlon Wayans mangled everyone’s name.

If you didn’t see it, it was a masterclass in getting it wrong. Watching Wayans announce the Golden Globe nominations was like living through one of those anxiety dreams where you’re asked to fly a jumbo jet and realise that you don’t know what any of the controls do. If you did see it, then I’m sure your toes will uncurl eventually.

Press conference expected to go ahead later, Venezuelan opposition leader’s first public appearance in 11 months

A press conference in Oslo with the Nobel peace prize laureate María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader in hiding, has been postponed but should take place later in the day, the Norwegian Nobel Institute has said.

The press conference, traditionally held by the Nobel laureate on the eve of the award ceremony, is expected to be the 58-year-old’s first public appearance in 11 months. Machado last appeared in public on 9 January at a demonstration in Caracas protesting against the inauguration of Nicolás Maduro for his third term as president.

Our cartoonist on the trouble at Anfield after Egyptian’s stinging response to being dropped by Arne Slot

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Activists from Hungary, El Salvador and Turkey offer advice to the US about what they’ve learned about authoritarians

Donald Trump makes no secret of his admiration for strongmen like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Last month, he praised Orbán’s hardline stance on immigration and urged European leaders to show more “respect” for the president; earlier this year his administration struck a deal with Bukele to send more than 200 detained migrants to a notorious, maximum-security prison in El Salvador.

Many international organizations, experts and historians have sounded the alarm about the United States heading in a similar direction as these authoritarian regimes.

US president blames leaders for being ‘politically correct’ and says migration is ‘unchecked, unvetted’ in interview with Politico

Oh, and a little warning shot from EU’s Kallas:

“If we go into the fight [of] pointing fingers, I mean, we can also point a lot of fingers [on] what is wrong in America, but this is not the way we work, we are not going to meddle with the internal affairs of other countries.”

The administration is offloading gems of US architecture while redesigning the city to match the president’s values

While the original architect of Donald Trump’s ever-expanding ballroom steps down and preservationists panic over the fate of New Deal murals inside the Social Security Administration building, the president gushes about painting the granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building white, “fixing” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and erecting his own Arc de Triomphe.

To peruse the plans for a Trump-era capital district alongside the General Services Administration’s list of assets identified for accelerated disposition – the federal buildings slated for off-loading – is to discern a diagram of Trump’s values.

Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism

Bing Liu’s film is an unflinching portrait of an undocumented Uyghur immigrant and a traumatised US veteran whose fragile connection is strained by their pasts

Chinese-American film-maker Bing Liu made an impression with the poignant documentary Minding the Gap about people from his home town in Illinois; now he pivots to features with this sad and sombre study of romance and life choices among those on the margins of US society, adapted from the prize-winning novel of the same name by Atticus Lish.

The scene is the no-questions-asked world of New York’s Chinatown; newcomer Sebiye Behtiyar plays Aishe, a Chinese Uyghur Muslim undocumented immigrant. One day she catches the eye of Skinner, played by Fred Hechinger, a young military veteran who impulsively starts to talk to her. There is a spark between them and then something more.

There are apparently breakthroughs on the way for those with sleep disorders – which sent me down a rabbit hole of research...

I met a guy in pharmaceuticals who told me about a bunch of cool breakthroughs in sleep meds: mainly, we may be on the brink of a new Wegovy, but in this case it’s a drug to cure narcolepsy. I suggested the two things are not quite the same, given that obesity is a global epidemic and narcolepsy is fairly rare. He countered that the way the drug works might also have applications for insomnia; similar to the Post-it note having been invented by someone trying to create the world’s strongest glue.

Anyway, in the course of this, I discovered the test for type 1 narcolepsy, which is that you’re put in a room with zero stimulation – nothing to read, no one to chat to, perfect silence, perfect temperature – and timed on how long it takes you to fall asleep. If it’s under eight minutes, you’re narcoleptic. But the average, for a person with no complaints in that area at all, is 22 minutes. I was completely incredulous. This is a grip on consciousness more or less the same as a house cat. Bored? Go to sleep. Even a dog will have a quick look for something to eat first.

Wigmore Hall, London
Barbara Hannigan and Bertrand Chamayou were exhilarating and extraordinary in John Zorn’s monumental Jumalattaret; a beautifully intimate performance of Messiaen’s Chants de Terre et de Ciel completed an enthralling evening

One generation’s “unperformable” is another’s repertoire staple. Tristan und Isolde, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and Beethoven’s Ninth were all once declared beyond reach. But when Barbara Hannigan – the fearless, seemingly limitless soprano with more than 100 world premieres to her name – admits that a work came close, reducing her to “a state of panic” over a multi-year study period, you believe her.

Inspired by Finland’s national epic the Kalevala, John Zorn’s Jumalattaret is less a song-cycle than a musical seance, summoning a series of spirits and goddesses in sound. The singer morphs from persona to persona in yelps and keening cries, guttural moans and shouts, sometimes anchored, sometimes released by the piano (here Bertrand Chamayou) – an ever-present sorcerer’s assistant.

Unauthorised touchdown comes less than 24 hours after Nigerian forces intervened in attempted coup in Benin

Eleven Nigerian military personnel are being held in Burkina Faso after a Nigerian plane reportedly entered Burkinabé airspace without authorisation on Monday, the latest twist in a region enmeshed in multiple political and security crises.

In a statement on Monday evening, the breakaway Alliance of Sahel States (AES), of which Burkina Faso is a member alongside Mali and Niger, said the C-130 transport aircraft had made an emergency landing in Bobo Dioulasso.

While all eyes have been on the war in Gaza, Israel’s occupation of southern Syria has been intensifying, and since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024, Israeli forces have taken advantage of the country’s instability and launched frequent air strikes, ground incursions, and rejected the long standing disengagement agreement established in 1974. The Guardian's Will Christou travelled to Al Quineitra in southern Syria, to see what Israel's military presence has meant for those living there.

Hollywood is still trying to court younger audiences but this year’s crop of new comedies, from Adults to I Love LA, have yet to prove essential

This year, despite not particularly liking the show nor wanting to, I have thought a lot about the opening scene to Adults. The FX half-hour comedy about a group of recent college graduates in New York begins, naturally, on the subway; what seems like an over-studied portrait of early adulthood intimacy – tangled limbs, in-group references, aggressively relaxed banter – quickly devolves into a standoff between a creepy subway masturbator and the group’s instigator, Issa (Amita Rao), trying to out-masturbate him to make a wildly off point about feminism. “Is this the world you want?!?” she shouts at him, hand vigorously in pants.

The moment is intentionally off-putting, perhaps too much so – I’m as ripe as anyone for surprise, but found the try-hardness of this shock memorably irksome. Yet it’s also unintentionally revealing: this, it implicitly screams, is a show to get young people’s attention. A similar anxiety courses through the opening of I Love LA, HBO’s west-coast rejoinder to Adults that is similarly pitched as a zeitgeist-y take on the thrilling chaos of young adulthood. We meet Maia, played by creator and co-writer Rachel Sennott, mid-sex with her boyfriend, heedlessly determined to come before going to work, even if it means ignoring an earthquake.