Civil suit, citing the Dating App Reporting Project, argues that dating apps could kick off serial rapists but don’t

The Dating Apps Reporting Project produced this story in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network and The Markup, now a part of CalMatters, and copublished with The Guardian and The 19th.

Six women who were drugged and raped or sexually assaulted by the same Denver cardiologist filed a lawsuit against Match Group on Tuesday, accusing the world’s largest dating app company of “accommodating rapists across its products” through “negligence” and a “defective” product.

Claim filed in Argentina alleges crimes against humanity were carried out on Women, Life, Freedom protesters

A group of victims of the Iranian government crackdown during the Women, Life, Freedom protests in 2022 have filed the first criminal complaint against 40 named Iranian officials alleging crimes against humanity, including targeted blinding and murder.

The request for a criminal investigation to be launched has been filed in Argentina by a group of Iranians with the help of the non-profit Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. The Argentinian legal system is especially open to accommodating universal jurisdiction claims.

The BBC has vowed to defend itself against the $10bn lawsuit that the US president, Donald Trump, filed against it. Trump alleges the broadcaster “intentionally, maliciously and deceptively” edited the 6 January speech he gave before the attack on the US Capitol. On Tuesday, a BBC spokesperson said: “As we have made clear previously, we will be defending this case. We are not going to make further comment on ongoing legal proceedings.”

Lucy Hough speaks to the head of national news, Archie Bland

Writers cited Machado’s support for Trump’s pressure campaign against Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro

At least three writers have withdrawn from next month’s Hay festival in Cartagena, Colombia, in protest at an invitation extended to the Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel laureate María Corina Machado.

The main reason cited by them is Machado’s support for Donald Trump’s four-month pressure campaign against Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro and her comments in favour of a potential US military intervention in the Caribbean country.

Producer Stephen Woolley pays tribute to Figgis, who has died aged 77, a brilliant professional whose ‘molotov cocktail personality’ enabled her work in British and Hollywood cinema

I first encountered Susie Figgis over 40 years ago when I interviewed her for The Company of Wolves, my debut movie production with Neil Jordan. We met at my then-cinema the Scala – it was a busy, noisy office but a sunny day, so we went up to the roof. Susie, who was already something of a legend having cast Stephen Frears’ Bloody Kids, Laura Mulvey’s avant garde films and Ben Kingsley in Gandhi, unleashed a volcanic eruption of unbridled enthusiasm for Angela Carter and Neil’s script. The collection of explosive expletives and voluble “darlings” almost blasted me to the King’s Cross streets below.

So began a professional relationship that spanned more than 23 movies. The task we set her for The Company of Wolves was tricky: to find an actor to play the adolescent Rosaleen. She achieved it through painstaking and meticulous methods (her trademark) over the next few months, exceeding our expectations when she discovered the excellent Sarah Patterson. She then topped that with the suggestion of Angela Lansbury for “Grannie” (who flew from Hollywood to shoot with us and had her character’s head decapitated for her troubles) and a superlative supporting cast of dancers, performance artists and veteran actors for our strange, violent woodland fairytale. Her passion for cinema was infectious: not only for the film-makers, but also the agents and actors who read our scripts. Susie demanded an intelligent and thoughtful response to the screenplays so no simple yes or no would suffice.

Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo and Eve Hewson head up the director’s latest effort

The first trailer for Steven Spielberg’s mysterious UFO movie has now provided more details on what audiences can expect.

Disclosure Day, written by Jurassic Park’s David Koepp based on a Spielberg story, sees a starry cast deal with the discovery of aliens. “Why would he make such a vast universe yet save it only for us?’” Elizabeth Marvel’s character says at the end of the teaser.

Region known as ‘world’s refrigerator’ is heating up as much as four times as quickly as global average, Noaa experts say

The Arctic endured a year of record heat and shrunken sea ice as the world’s northern latitudes continue a rapid shift to becoming rainier and less ice-bound due to the climate crisis, scientists have reported.

From October 2024 to September 2025, temperatures across the entire Arctic region were the hottest in 125 years of modern record keeping, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said, with the last 10 years being the 10 warmest on record in the Arctic.

A breast cancer diagnosis is hard enough – what happens when a mother and daughter go through it at the same time?

Genna Freed should have been in the mood to celebrate. On a cloudy November day in 2022, her mother, Julie Newman, was about to complete her final round of radiation, after being diagnosed with breast cancer in September. The whole family, a close-knit bunch, was gathering with balloons and signs.

But Freed, then a few weeks shy of her 31st birthday, was carrying a secret. Spurred by her mother’s diagnosis, she had her first mammogram a couple days earlier, and it had turned up a suspicious spot. Now she needed a second, diagnostic mammogram, and likely a biopsy. She found herself walking a surreal sort of tightrope, caught between relief that her mother’s treatment was over and fear that she might soon be starting her own.

Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar co-star as Sweeney’s secretive bosses in an upstate New York mansion, and director Paul Feig ramps up the sexual tension with evident gusto

Director Paul Feig is known for broad comedy; now he cranks up the schlock-serious dial for an outrageously enjoyable – or at any rate enjoyably outrageous – psycho-suspense thriller in the spirit of 90s erotic noir, adapted by screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine from the 2022 bestseller by Freida McFadden. We are back in the sleazy, glossy world of Curtis Hanson’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle or Joe Eszterhas’s Basic Instinct, but skating quite close, though not too close, to satire.

The scene is a bizarrely opulent mansion somewhere in upstate New York, splendidly isolated among a sea of bland suburban housing; it is approached by a drive, once you have got past the electronic gates. And it is down this avenue that Millie (Sydney Sweeney) nervously drives, wearing fake glasses to make herself look more mature, to apply for the job of live-in housemaid to the wealthy couple that lives there; she is hoping her prospective employers will not notice the worrying inconsistencies in her CV. She is greeted with smiley, Stepford-blond blandness by Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried), who appears to adore Millie, and explains that the job entails cooking, cleaning and looking after her young daughter, Cece (Indiana Elle).

Linguists say the prime minister’s use of ‘s’ instead of ‘z’ breaks national English conventions

Mark Carney says that amid a fundamental shift to the nature of globalisation, his government will catalyse the growth in both the public and private sector.

But Canadian linguists say that’s a problem.

The 2016 drama, loosely inspired by the father-son relationship, is a gritty drama about addiction that has now become a puzzle piece

Being Charlie, a 2016 movie directed by the late Rob Reiner, stands out from the director’s filmography for a number of reasons. It’s a gritty and grounded addiction movie with a few comic elements, less ebullient than many of the movies Reiner was famous for, as well as the others he was making in the 2010s. It features then-up-and-coming stars, rather than more established figures, and way more sex and nudity than usual. And it’s the only movie co-written by Reiner’s son, Nick, whose experiences formed the basis for the screenplay, and who is now expected to be charged in the murder of both his parents.

Those horrific circumstances transform Being Charlie from one of Reiner’s more interesting late-period efforts into the subject of unavoidable rubbernecking. Here is a film Reiner made in collaboration with his son, in part as an obvious act of hope that the worst of his struggles would prove to be behind him. Real life was not quite so cooperative as the open-ended but vaguely optimistic resolution of a well-intentioned indie drama.

Rescheduling marijuana might seem an unlikely move for a Republican president – but it perfectly coheres with his ‘America First’ worldview

For decades, the issue of cannabis reform was firmly viewed as a leftist pipe dream. To most conservatives, particularly US Republicans, legalising weed was as realistic as nuclear disarmament, or abolishing national borders.

Think of the phrase “war on drugs” and the first people that probably come to mind are Republican presidents Nixon, Reagan and George HW and George W Bush. Although the clampdown reached its harshest levels during the presidency of Mr “I didn’t inhale” Bill Clinton, it always seemed as if the GOP owned the position of being “tough on drugs”. As recently as 2023, Mitch McConnell, then Senate Republican leader, reaffirmed this reputation by stating that: “Democrats are struggling with the basics. This should not be this hard. Drugs belong off our streets.”

Dr Kojo Koram is professor of law and political economy at Loughborough University, and writes on issues of law, race and empire. He is the author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire

Late-night hosts also discussed a horrific news weekend and the president’s strange Christmas story about snakes

Late-night hosts reacted to the murder of legendary director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, as well as Donald Trump’s 10-minute tangent about Christmas snakes.

Social and environmental reporting to be required of fewer companies after EPP aligns with far right to achieve goals

• Europe live – latest updates

Fewer companies operating in Europe will be made to carry out due diligence on the societal harms they cause, in what green groups have called a “betrayal” of communities affected by corporate abuse.

The gutting of the EU’s sustainability reporting and due diligence rules, which was greenlit by MEPs on Tuesday, slashes the number of companies covered by laws to protect human and ecological rights, and removes provisions to harmonise access to justice across member states.

News of Ahmed al-Ahmed’s selfless act quickly reached al-Nayrab, where locals say it proves religion or birthplace no barrier to heroism

A man who risked his life to wrestle a gun from a shooter in the Bondi beach terror attack on Sunday has become a hero in his home town in Syria.

Video of Ahmed al-Ahmed’s selfless act quickly reached his birthplace of al-Nayrab, a small town in the countryside of Idlib, north-west Syria. Ahmed, a 44-year-old father of two children, left the village to emigrate to Australia in 2007. He initially worked in construction, but soon opened a fruit and vegetable shop in Sydney.

District attorney’s office has until Wednesday to file charges against Nick Reiner following deaths of his parents

Los Angeles investigators are expected on Tuesday to lay out their case against Nick Reiner, who was arrested on suspicion of murdering his parents, the actor-director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner.

Detectives from the Los Angeles police department’s (LAPD) homicide division took Nick, 32, into custody on Sunday night, hours after his parents were found dead in their Brentwood home, the department announced on Monday.

Beyond Wham! and Elton, Guardian writers from across the generations select the songs that conjure the personal magic and memories of the season

I’m always fascinated by the ways in which my generation manage to participate in the circulation of music. Amateur TikTok edits resurrect forgotten gems and turn obscure starlets into sensations; home producers fabricate entire albums if their favourite rapper doesn’t release enough. Such is the case with Doom Xmas, the brainchild of Grammy-winning Spanish producer Cookin’ Soul, which refashions the work of late cult rapper MF Doom into Christmas music. There are filthy Grinch soundtrack flips, hectic Latin Christmas skits and a chopped-and-screwed Nat King Cole that’ll change the way you hear The Christmas Song.

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Equinor accused of ‘extensive and long-term pollution’ caused by years of inadequate maintenance

Norway’s national oil company, Equinor, is facing a £53m penalty for oil spills and gas leaks at the oil-rich Scandinavian state’s only refinery, which officials said were the result of years of inadequate maintenance.

Norway’s economic crime agency, Økokrim, said it had taken action against Equinor over “extensive and long-term pollution” at the refinery in Mongstad, on Norway’s North Sea coast.

Peter Hujar captured a queer Manhattan demi-monde that is now lost to Aids. Whishaw reveals what he learned playing the photographer in a minimalist film being hailed by some as a masterpiece

On 19 December 1974, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz went round to her friend Peter Hujar’s apartment in New York, and asked the photographer to describe exactly what he had done the day before. He talked in great detail about taking Allen Ginsberg’s portrait for the New York Times (it didn’t go well – Ginsberg was too performative for the kind of intimacy Hujar craved). He also described the Chinese takeaway he ate and how his pal Vince Aletti came round to have a shower. And he fretted about not being paid by Elle magazine.

So what did Ben Whishaw, who plays him in the new film Peter Hujar’s Day, do himself the day before? The actor, on a video call from his home in London, rubbing his hands through his hair in a worried manner, says he could probably describe it in “about five sentences”, but after some persuasion attempts to give a flavour. “I got home from filming and I got the chicken that I’d cooked the previous day and eaten half of and I finished it. Well, not finished it but continued eating it and then had a glass of wine and fell asleep at half past nine. Boring. But, um, maybe there’s no such thing as boring.”

While the New York mayor-elect is constantly smiling in the face of his detractors, having a perma-grin didn’t come so easily to me

As a big fan of citizen science, I have spent the past month conducting a very important experiment. While I am not quite as hardcore as the American virologist Jonas Salk, who injected the polio vaccine into himself and his family before large-scale trials, this scientific inquiry has involved some personal pain. You see, I have spent the last month trying to smile like Zohran Mamdani. This is not, as I have discovered, an easy feat.

Ever since the incoming mayor of New York became a household name, I’ve been intrigued by his perma-smile. His detractors call him a “jihadist”, and he smiles. He meets Donald Trump, and he smiles. Some Republican lawmakers launch a campaign to investigate his path to citizenship and deport him? He keeps on smiling. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him look angry.

British Indian Ocean Territory commissioner’s appeal against decision last year rejected by judges in London

Appeal court judges have backed a decision that dozens of asylum seekers were unlawfully detained on one of the world’s most remote islands, rejecting an appeal on Tuesday by the commissioner for the territory.

Exactly a year ago, on 16 December 2024, a judge ruled that Tamils who arrived on the island of Diego Garcia, a UK and US military base, after a shipwreck while they were trying to reach Canada to seek asylum, were unlawfully detained there for three years in conditions described as “hell on Earth”.

• Chelsea injuries up 44% on previous year, Howden finds

• It calculates injury cost in top leagues over past five years

Chelsea experienced a 44% increase in injuries between June and October compared with the previous season, a report released on Tuesday has found. This year’s period covers their participation in the Club World Cup and its aftermath.

The figure, which goes some way towards vindicating Enzo Maresca’s rotation and his complaints about injuries, is contained in a report published by the insurance company Howden, which puts the cost of injuries to clubs in Europe’s top five leagues over the past five years at almost £3bn.

Organisers of award in honour of late primatologist hope it will inspire and encourage people to take action

Earth might be under pressure, but the Queen guitarist Sir Brian May is hopeful a new award from the science, music and arts festival he co-founded will encourage people to take action.

The Starmus Jane Goodall Earth medal will be given in honour of the British primatologist who died this year and will recognise those who champion life on Earth.