Protests against deteriorating living conditions have widened to include criticism of way country is being governed

Alborz, a textile merchant in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, decided he could no longer sit on the sidelines. He closed his shop and took to the streets, joining merchants across Iran who shuttered their stores and students who took over their campuses to protest against declining economic conditions.

The sudden loss of purchasing power pushed Alborz and tens of thousands of other Iranians into the streets, where protests are now entering their fourth day. Students have paralysed university campuses, traders have shut down their stores and demonstrators have blocked off streets in defiance of police. Protests have spread from the capital, Tehran, to cities across the country.

Begum’s lawyers argue she was child trafficking victim when she travelled to live under IS in Syria in 2015

The European court of human rights has questioned the UK government over its 2019 decision to remove Shamima Begum’s British citizenship.

Lawyers in Europe have asked how Begum’s treatment complies with the UK’s responsibilities to victims of trafficking.

Legal action has brought important decisions, from the scrapping of fossil fuel plants to revised climate plans

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Paris agreement. It is also a decade since another key moment in climate justice, when a state was ordered for the first time to cut its carbon emissions faster to protect its citizens from climate change. The Urgenda case, which was upheld by the Netherlands’ supreme court in 2019, was one of the first rumblings of a wave of climate litigation around the world that campaigners say has resulted in a new legal architecture for climate protection.

Over the past 12 months, there have been many more important rulings and tangible changes on climate driven by legal action.

Bylaws that would limit voting to Trump-appointed trustees appears to reveal long-held renaming plan

The Kennedy Center reportedly adopted bylaws earlier this year that would limit voting to Donald Trump-appointed trustees – a controversial move that appears to reveal the long-held plan to install Trump’s name to the center.

The bylaws, in a possible breach of the institution’s charter, were revised in May and specified that board members appointed by Congress, known as ex-officio members, could not vote or count towards a quorum, according to the Washington Post.

Fifty-two black bears were killed in three-week hunt state officials said was necessary to reduce ursine population

Wildlife officials in Florida say the slaughter of dozens of black bears during a controversial three-week hunt this month was a success, despite the opposition of protesters who condemned the “heartbreaking, bloody spectacle”.

The Florida fish and wildlife conservation commission (FWC) on Tuesday announced that 52 bears were killed between 6 and 28 December, and promised to release a “full harvest report” in the coming months that will provide details about where and how the animals died.

Tesla endured tough year in part thanks to some consumers’ distaste for Elon Musk’s embrace of rightwing politics

Tesla has taken the unusual step of publishing sales forecasts that suggest 2025 deliveries will be lower than expected and future years’ sales will be well below targets set by its chief executive, Elon Musk.

The US electric vehicle maker published figures from analysts suggesting it will announce 423,000 deliveries during the fourth quarter of 2025, in a new “consensus” section on its investor website. That would represent a 16% decline from the final quarter of 2024.

Happiness research has found we get more joy from active, challenging experiences than from passive consumption. So go somewhere new, grab the karaoke mic and leap out of your comfort zone

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‘It’s nice to have a night out that doesn’t revolve around drinking,” says the person next to me as we put the finishing touches to our lino prints of pomegranates, wintry trees, the anime character Totoro (mine) and a martini-drinking cat, which we’ve spent our Friday evenings crafting. There has been wine, but it wasn’t central to the evening – a small block of clay and some inks were.

It’s a different kind of night out from going for dinner and, possibly, having one too many, which is the formula plenty of us fall back on. At best that can be fun and nurturing, but at worst you find yourself on the bus home feeling hollowed out and en route to a hangover. So how else can we let our hair down?

Thirty-seven NGOs told they have to cease operations, putting Palestinian lives ‘at imminent risk’

Israel’s new ban on dozens of aid organisations working in Gaza will have “catastrophic” consequences for the delivery of vital services in the devastated territory and will put Palestinian lives “at imminent risk”, diplomats, humanitarian workers and experts say.

Thirty-seven NGOs active in Gaza were told by Israel’s ministry of diaspora affairs on Tuesday that they would have to cease all operations in the territory within 60 days unless they fulfilled stringent new regulations, which include the disclosure of personal details of their staff.

Community leaders raise alarm over study links and Polynesian ties, with Tonga to face restrictions from January as US says too many overstay

The small Pacific nation of Tonga is one of more than a dozen countries to be hit with visa and entry restrictions on 1 January as the Trump administration tightens its crackdown on immigration.

In December, the US said it would further restrict and limit the entry of foreign nationals to protect the country from “national security and public safety threats”.

• Striker has nine goals since joining on loan

• Champions League qualification brings obligation to buy

The Napoli sporting director, Giovanni Manna, considers Rasmus Højlund’s permanent transfer from Manchester United a “formality”.

Højlund joined the Serie A champions on loan last summer and the Denmark striker has scored nine goals in 20 appearances, including a double in Sunday’s 2-0 win at Cremonese. Napoli are third in Serie A, occupying one of Italy’s four Champions League places.

Scatological lyrics, social conscience and a shoutout from Walton Goggins – 2026 is going to be the laptop garage band’s year

It’s a Saturday night in Camden, London, and Getdown Services’ fans are getting the beers in before “Britain’s best band” play one of their final gigs of the year. The Electric Ballroom is heaving, despite this being their second show here in a month. There’s no shortage of twentysomethings with shag hairstyles to explain why the duo live up to their slogan. “They’re fun, which we need right now – life is bleak,” says Dulcie. “And they’re socially aware,” adds her friend Lotte. “Even though they are quite silly, they’re grounded.”

Across the bar, Dylan, 22, says that he finds Getdown Services and their genre-agnostic beats empowering: “They’re a laptop garage band that are having fun doing what they love, and seeing that makes me want to do what I love as well.” His pal James, 29, has returned for a repeat performance. “I came to the other Getdown Services show and I felt more jubilant than I did at Oasis,” he says.

Guardian US readers share how global heating and biodiversity loss affected their lives in ways that don’t always make the headlines

The past year was another one of record-setting heat and catastrophic storms. But across the US, the climate crisis showed up in smaller, deeply personal ways too.

Campfires that once defined summer trips were never lit due to wildfire risks. There were no bites where fish were once abundant, forests turned to meadows after a big burn and childhood memories of winter wonderlands turned to slush.

Artwork by one of the most influential artists of 20th century raffled to fund Alzheimer’s research

His work is consistently ranked among the world’s most expensive art, with paintings fetching more than a $100m at auction. But you no longer need to be a multimillionaire to own a Picasso – for €100, anyone in the world has the chance to walk away with a painting by one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

The French charity Alzheimer’s Research Foundation announced recently it was raffling Picasso’s 1941 portrait, Tête de femme, which is worth more than €1m, to a single winner. Proceeds from the tickets will help fund Alzheimer’s research, one of the leading causes of death and disability worldwide.

Figure represents significant expansion on earlier estimates as effort draws resources away from other DoJ cases

The US justice department is believed to be reviewing more than 5m pages of documents relating to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein – an effort that is drawing resources away from existing cases, according to the New York Times.

The figure represents a significant expansion on earlier estimates, which drew on calculations based on 300 gigabytes of data, papers, videos, photographs and audio files held within FBI archives that relate to investigations in Florida and New York.

From El Salvador to Russia, Iceland and Syria, women are pushing back against the rise of regressive forces. Let’s support their fight

• Rahila Gupta is an anti-racist feminist activist and the co-author, with Beatrix Campbell, of Planet Patriarchy

In 2025, the world that had been opened up by women has often seemed to be closing in. The forces behind the rollback of abortion rights in Donald Trump’s US are attempting to do the same in the UK. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has doubled down on its attacks on women and girls. Sexual violence is commonplace in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Mexico, even the president is not safe from sexual assault. A perverse rewilding appears to be taking place.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that around the world, women’s rights are being concreted over. But in researching our book, Planet Patriarchy, Beatrix Campbell and I found women’s resistance erupting like green shoots through the cracks. In El Salvador, women can receive sentences of 30-50 years for miscarriages construed to be abortions. Yet feminists have managed to free all 72 women who had been imprisoned for this, using innovative penal and legal strategies. In Russia, feminists have taken to wearing blue and yellow ribbons, the colours of the Ukrainian flag, to signal their anti-war solidarity.

Rahila Gupta is an anti-racist feminist activist and the co-author, with Beatrix Campbell, of Planet Patriarchy

The US president and his allies spent 2025 attacking the Federal Reserve amid a rollercoaster year for the US economy

In the bowels of the US Federal Reserve this summer, two of the world’s most powerful men, sporting glistening white hard hats, stood before reporters looking like students forced to work together on a group project.

Allies of Donald Trump had spent weeks trying to manufacture a scandal around ongoing renovations of the central bank’s Washington headquarters and its costs. Now here was the US president, on a rare visit, examining the project for himself.

From the construction worker who won a place at medical school to an art exhibition in a country with no galleries, we asked journalists for their most optimistic tales of the year

Founder of the Migration Story, India

Intensifying attacks on Ukraine’s Danube ports bring blasts, evacuations and fear of escalation to border communities

At the edge of Romania’s Danube delta on the border with Ukraine, in the village of Plauru, cows graze in flat, marshy fields. Houses with blue-painted roofs and window frames line a dirt track, many shuttered or abandoned.

Residents can see the cranes and silos of Izmail, a Ukrainian port city separated from Plauru by the 300 metre-width of the Danube River. By day the scene is deceptively calm. But sometimes, after dark, that calm dissolves.

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

Reunification ‘is unstoppable’, says Chinese president, a day after the conclusion of intense military drills

China’s president, Xi Jinping, has vowed to reunify China and Taiwan in his annual New Year’s Eve speech in Beijing.

Speaking the day after the conclusion of intense Chinese military drills around Taiwan, Xi said: “The reunification of our motherland, a trend of the times, is unstoppable.”

Draft bill to be submitted for legal checks as France aims to follow Australia’s world-first ban on platforms including Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube

France intends to follow Australia and ban social media platforms for children from the start of the 2026 academic year.

A draft bill preventing under-15s from using social media will be submitted for legal checks and is expected to be debated in parliament early in the new year.

• Liverpool head coach’s new full-backs have struggled

• Slot expects improvement as squad and signings settle

Arne Slot has said Liverpool remain “a work in progress” in both full-back positions but backed Jeremie Frimpong and Milos Kerkez to make their mark as his team stabilise.

Slot admits Liverpool are still adjusting to the end of the Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andy Robertson era with injuries and disruption limiting the impact of their designated successors, including Conor Bradley. Frimpong has improved since returning from his second hamstring injury of the season, however, and provided assists for Hugo Ekitiké and Ryan Gravenberch in the recent victories over Tottenham and Wolves. Slot believes the summer signings Frimpong and Kerkez, from Bayer Leverkusen and Bournemouth respectively, will prove valuable assets for Liverpool, with their pace essential for the modern game.

While GLP-1 drugs promise an easy fix, our bodies still need what they have always needed: healthy food and regular exercise

• Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

If there has been a hot topic in health in 2025, it’s definitely been GLP-1s, colloquially referred to as “anti-obesity” jabs. These medications, taken weekly as an injection into the abdomen, result in significant weight loss and, despite being developed to manage type 2 diabetes in those with metabolic disorders, have become mainstream in many countries as a treatment for obesity. Clinicians rave about the health outcomes in patients taking the medication, with study after study emerging on the health benefits of the associated weight loss in those who are obese. Celebrity endorsements, online sales and off-label use have seen them widely used by people of all ages and sizes who want to drop weight.

For the public health community, it’s an odd moment. For years, we’ve advocated for government action on obesity – not through new drugs, but by taking nutrition and food systems seriously. We’ve highlighted the need for government action on making nutritious food affordable, regulating ultra-processed foods, bringing in sugar taxes and banning advertising of unhealthy products to young people, alongside encouraging an increase in physical activity. The solutions are simple: get people to eat more nutritious food and move. The challenge has been implementation, especially in deprived areas.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

Fit Forever: Wellness for midlife and beyond
On Wednesday 28 January 2026, join Annie Kelly, Devi Sridhar, Joel Snape and Mariella Frostrup, as they discuss how to enjoy longer and healthier lives, with expert advice and practical tips. Book tickets here or at guardian.live