Health secretary unhappy as resident doctors in England have started a five-day strike today

This is from Helen Miller, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank, on the market reaction to the chancellor’s reported budget U-turn.

Investors will have 2 broad concerns about news that Chancellor won’t increase income tax rates

1. Does it signal less willingness to do politically difficult things

Britain’s long-term borrowing costs were sent soaring as reports suggested the latest U-turn would leave Rachel Reeves scrambling to fill a gaping black hole in the nation’s finances just two weeks before the 26 November budget.

Yields on 30-year UK government bonds, also known as gilts, jumped as much as 14 basis points in early trading, and the yield on 10-year gilts also shot up 12 basis points – rising the most since July.

Authoritarian leader calls for US to make peace amid military buildup and strikes against alleged drug smugglers

• Explainer: is US preparing to attack Venezuela?

Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, has urged Donald Trump not to lead the US into an Afghanistan-style “forever war”, as the American military buildup in the region intensified and Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, vowed to purge the Americas of “narco-terrorists”.

Speaking to CNN outside the Miraflores presidential palace in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, Maduro called on Trump to make peace, not war, after the world’s largest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R Ford, arrived in the region.

Move follows opposition from newspaper’s newsroom to US private equity group’s offer and links to China

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The consortium led by RedBird Capital has dropped its £500m bid for the Telegraph, throwing the future of the daily and Sunday titles into further uncertainty.

The private equity group founded by Gerry Cardinale has been under intense attack in recent weeks with the Telegraph newsroom – and allies including former editor Charles Moore and ex-Spectator chief Fraser Nelson – publishing a string of pieces calling for its links to China to be investigated.

They have strong Christmas connotations, but these nuts are so versatile, whether you’re eating them hot out of the shell, or with pasta or pheasant. Plus: a burger that lives up to the hype

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If I’d ever spared a thought for how chestnuts – the sweet, edible kind, not the combative horsey sort – were harvested, I would probably have conjured rosy-cheeked peasants bent low in ancient forests and filling rough-hewn hessian sacks by hand. Back-breaking labour, sure, but so picturesque!

I was delighted, therefore, while on a writing retreat in Umbria last month, to get the opportunity to watch an elderly couple manoeuvre a giant vacuum around their haphazard orchard, followed by their furious sheepdog. The fallen crop was sucked into a giant fan that spat their bristly jackets back out on to the ground, and the nuts then went to be sorted by other family members on a conveyor belt in the barn – the good ones to be sold in the shell, the less perfect specimens swiftly dropped into a bucket for processing.

US Conference of Catholic Bishops calls for ‘meaningful immigration reform’ in first message of its kind in 12 years

As the Trump administration and Texas governor Greg Abbott restrict free speech on college campuses, two professors at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) are suing the university for retaliation stemming from 2024 arrests at a peaceful campus protest.

History professors Ben Wright and Rosemary Admiral argue they should not have been arrested in the first place at the 1 May 2024 demonstration, where they were standing between their students and heavily armed law enforcement.

Midwest struck by extreme snowfall and 80 southern weather stations tied or broke low-temperature records

The eastern half of the US has been gripped by an exceptional early winter cold spell this week, breaking a multitude of low-temperature records. Eighty weather stations across the deep south either tied or broke their daily minimum record on 11 November. Jacksonville in northern Florida experienced temperatures as low as -3C early on Wednesday morning, 17C below the average minimum for the time of year.

The cold outbreak also brought extreme snowfall to parts of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. Areas along the southern and western coasts of Lake Michigan experienced a phenomenon known as lake effect snow on Monday. This develops when cold air – which covered the US this week – moves over the relatively warm water of a lake or inland sea. This produces convection and heavy showers that move inland downwind of the lake, and can continue for hours or even days on end.

The country’s government is upbeat about the economic prospects of the growing number of windfarms, solar parks and industrial complexes but others warn of ‘green colonialism’

For generations, Alfonso Campos’s family has raised sheep in the grasslands of San Gregorio, a tranquil area in Magallanes province, in the far south of Chile’s Patagonia region. Now, he says, his farm will be encircled by three massive containers of ammonia, a desalination plant, a hydrogen plant, gas pipelines and hundreds of wind turbines.

“If the ammonia leaks, it will poison everything,” he says. “The noise of the windmills will also upset the animals, and the landscape will be turned into an industrial desert.”

When the rain started I had to find a way home to my children. I could never have imagined how long it would take. This is Ruchira’s story

Location Mumbai, India

Disaster Maharashtra floods, 2005

Ruchira Gupta is an English-to-Hindi interpreter, a former lawyer, and mother of two daughters. In 2005, she was working at a small law firm in Mumbai, India when heavy rainfall flooded the country’s western state of Maharashtra, killing 926 people. Between 1950 and 2015, there was a threefold increase in extreme rain events in India.

Disease outbreaks from South America to Europe have been worsened by rising global temperatures, experts say

Surging cases of yellow fever and dengue in South America highlight the growing assault on people’s health from the climate crisis, with infectious diseases spread by mosquitoes and deadly heat also now pushing into temperate regions such as Europe, experts have warned at the Cop30 climate summit.

There have been 356 cases of yellow fever in South America and 152 deaths so far this year, largely in the Amazon region, according to Pan American Health Organization figures. Apart from a large spike in 2017 and 2018, this is the largest number of yellow fever cases for any year in the continent, bar one, since 1960.

Overpowering, explosive and intense, the trio’s contemporary form of psychedelia is rebooted for the troubled, disturbing climate of 2025

From Brighton
Recommended if you like Osees, Ty Segall, the noisier bits of King Gizzard
Up next Currently working on a debut album for release next year.

A city with its own psych festival, and indeed a gig promotion company called Acid Box, Brighton has no shortage of lysergic left-field rock bands. But while most of their local contemporaries tend to the more recumbent end of the psychedelic spectrum, Oral Habit deal in what they call “the ear-rattling psychic dream of choked-up acid punks”, a sound that feels overpowering, explosive and intense: you could say it’s more closely aligned to the disoriented racket of mid-60s freakbeat than the pie-eyed beatitudes of the Summer of Love; equally you could suggest it’s a very contemporary form of psychedelia, rebooted for the troubled, disturbing climate of 2025.

The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery; The Confessions by Paul Bradley Carr; The Good Nazi by Samir Machado de Machado; Bluff by Francine Toon; The Token by Sharon Bolton

The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery (Viking, £16.99)
The first novel for adults by award-winning children’s author Montgomery is a locked-room mystery set in 1910 on a remote tidal island off the Cornish coast. At Tithe Hall, Lord Conrad Stockingham-Welt is busy instructing his servants to prepare for the apocalyptic disaster he believes will be triggered by the imminent passage of Halley’s comet. The labyrinthine house is a nest of secrets and grudges, harboured by both staff and family members, who include an irascible and splendidly foul-mouthed maiden aunt, Decima. When Lord Conrad is discovered in his sealed study, killed by a crossbow bolt to the eye, she co-opts a new footman to help her find the culprit. With plenty of twists, red herrings and a blundering police officer, this is a terrific start to a series that promises to be a lot of fun.

What prompted this change, and how has it affected you?

Are you bored of AI slop dominating news feeds? Fed up of “enshittification”? Tired out by “advice pollution”? Done with polarising content? Giving up social media and rediscovering the joy of boredom?

One study shows that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has gone into decline since then, according to an analysis conducted for the Financial Times by digital audience insights company GWI.

About 600,000 people seeking compensation a decade on from disaster that killed 19 and devastated villages

A London judge has ruled that the global mining company BHP Group is liable in Brazil’s worst environmental disaster, when a dam collapse 10 years ago unleashed tons of toxic waste into a major river, killing 19 people and devastating villages downstream.

Mrs Justice O’Farrell said at the high court that Australia-based BHP was responsible despite not owning the dam at the time.

Authorities held 153 passengers, including children and a heavily pregnant woman, over travel documents

South African authorities are facing heavy criticism after they held more than 150 Palestinians, including a woman who was nine months pregnant, on a plane for about 12 hours because of problems with their travel documents.

A pastor who was allowed to meet the passengers while they were stuck on the plane said it was extremely hot and that children were screaming and crying.

Singer-songwriter revered in Brazil for founding the Clube da Esquina collective and releasing two landmark albums of the 1970s

The year of 1972 was an extraordinary one for the young Brazilian singer, guitarist and songwriter Lô Borges. Along with his friend Milton Nascimento, he created one of the most celebrated albums in Brazilian music history, Clube da Esquina, featuring many of his compositions. In the same year he also released his first solo album, which gained similar recognition as a Brazilian classic. Borges, who has died aged 73, may not have achieved Nascimento’s international celebrity, but he played a key role in transforming his country’s music.

Clube da Esquina (Corner Club) had its genesis in a group of friends who met up to play and write songs on the corner of Divinópolis and Paraisópolis streets in Belo Horizonte, the state capital of Minas Gerais in the south east of Brazil.

Text messages released by US House show convicted sex offender coaching Maga influencer on political messaging

The convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein apparently served as a behind-the-scenes adviser to the former Trump official and Maga influencer Steve Bannon during an August 2018 media campaign to defend Trump and his agenda, and to promote Bannon’s media ventures.

Text messages released by the House oversight committee on Wednesday detail a six-day exchange between the men from 17 to 23 August, and show Epstein coaching Bannon on television appearances and political messaging.

Democrats finally had bargaining power and they caved. It’s nothing new – but it’s proof voters must make our demands clear

Chuck Schumer couldn’t hold his senators together at a time when their unity and toughness were essential. And at a time when they were winning: most of the public was blaming Republicans for the shutdown, and pressure was growing to reopen the government (flight delays were mounting).

Does this mean Schumer should go? Yes.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now

Such is his grumpiness, it isn’t clear why the 85-year-old wanted to make the film – though ‘I need the money’ is a running gag

The long and fabled history of Monty Python has now reached its footnotes and afterthoughts era. After years of interpersonal disputes, multiple forays into the culture war and one very expensive divorce, 85-year-old John Cleese goes solo with a thin 80-minute travelogue, undertaking a European mini-tour while enduring a roll call of ailments (partial deafness, bone spurs, vertigo) which appears at least as substantive as his onstage material. Explaining his motivation, Cleese is not untypically blunt: a wheezy “I need the money” is the closest this film locates to a running gag.

What are we offered in return? Near-relentless gripes and grievances that mesh with Cleese’s recent media profile, ranging from the endless repacking to being filmed at all hours. (Perhaps understandable, given director Andy Curd’s often unflattering angles.) Also lambasted: audiences who refuse to titter at such routines as the one in which Cleese spends a small eternity hacking up phlegm. We get oddly little of the show itself, instead there’s much B-roll filler in fish markets and cheese shops, and an unlovely photomontage of the comic’s battered big toe. (In fairness, he warns us: “If you’ve just had a mouthful of popcorn, look away now.”)

The broadcaster was once attacked by critics for being too progressive. But that stance appears to have changed for good in Trump’s second term

“What happened to the Redskins, by the way?” Donald Trump asked in an interview on the Pat McAfee Show that notably did not stick to sports. His call-in appearance on Tuesday’s program to mark Veterans Day was meant to be a major coup for ESPN, the first time Trump had been interviewed on the network as a sitting president. But viewers could have just as easily been mistaken into believing they were watching Fox News.

Trump took his usual shots at Joe Biden, claimed credit for the Department for Veteran Affairs’ high approval ratings and declared victory over the Democrats in a government shut down that dragged on for a depressing 43 days. Rather than push back against the political self-promotion, McAfee cheered Trump on before opening the floor to his lackeys to ask him which NFL coach would make a great president. It was all delivered live from South Carolina’s Parris Island, the US’s oldest Marine depot, which gave McAfee further excuse to goad the commander-in-chief into barking “oorah” – a Marine battle cry that the recruits present were duty bound to respond to in kind. The only thing missing from the jingoistic scene was a monument to ESPN’s fallen integrity.

A sunny spring helped the plants to flourish in gardens. Now dig up their runners and position them elsewhere on your patch to avoid disease

It has been an epic year for fruit. My strawberry patch – which had been mediocre at best until this season – flourished in those extremely sunny spring days. Not only did we pick more fruit, but the strawberries were larger and sweeter than those of previous years. And even when the fruit had dwindled, the runners – the new plants emerging from the parent plant – just kept coming. They’ve stretched out from their original site, romped into the path and rooted into a neighbour’s bed.

Strawberry plants will produce fruit for a good three to four years and then start to slow down, so when you’ve reached this point it’s a good idea to replant your patch. You can do this with newly bought plants (a wise choice if yours are showing signs of disease or vulnerability) or by relocating the new runners that have appeared this season.

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Culture secretary says she shares concerns that such appointments have damaged trust, amid calls for Robbie Gibb to go

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The BBC’s charter review will examine political appointments to the broadcaster’s board, Lisa Nandy has said, as they have “damaged confidence and trust”.

The culture secretary was asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme whether the BBC board member Robbie Gibb, formerly Theresa May’s communications chief, had overstepped his remit and weighed in on politics.

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Here’s Barney Ronay’s take on last night’s game at Wembley and the big talking point: England’s No 10.

“Tuchel has been very clear. He wants a structure not a group of the coolest guys, a selection by aura. And in many ways it worked here as on 65 minutes, with England already 1-0 up, we finally got it, the shootout of the No 10s. We got energy, mood-shift, a four-man blazing squad entering the field of play: Jude, Phil, Eberechi Eze and, er, Jordan Henderson.”

Drones and missiles used to target Kyiv with at least four people killed and ‘dozens’ wounded

• Russia attacks every district of Kyiv

We have just had an update on the death toll from the overnight attack on Kyiv, via AFP, with authorities now reporting six people dead.

in Brussels