For more context on today’s Starmer-Xi meeting, China is the world’s second-biggest economy and Britain’s third-largest trading partner – to which it exports £45bn of goods and services a year – so it is no surprise the UK has turned to Beijing in its search for economic reliability.
As the Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar reported earlier today, the UK does not rank among the top 10 of China’s trading partners but the Beijing leadership has spied a political opportunity to improve links with one of Washington’s closest allies at a time of deep uncertainty in the transatlantic alliance.
About two minutes of video, published on Wednesday by The News Movement, a digital news outlet, shows an incident on 13 January in Minneapolis in which officers appeared to grab Pretti and bring him to the ground during intense community protests against the federal crackdown in the city.
Holburne museum places renowned photographer’s pictures of ancient Roman statutes alongside his images of war and conflict
He is revered for his extraordinary black-and-white images documenting conflict, humanitarian crises and the tougher side of postwar Britain.
But an exhibition of work by photojournalist Sir Don McCullin opening this week at the Holburne museum in Bath focuses on a very different subject: Roman sculptures.
Mothers on social media are advocating a tough, no-nonsense approach to parenting. Does this teach children important lessons – or just make them feel isolated and ashamed?
A couple of weeks ago, a video posted on TikTok by Paige Carter, a mother in Florida, went viral. Carter explained that she had thrown her daughter’s iPad out of the window when she had been misbehaving on the way to school, and she films herself retrieving the tablet, now with a cracked screen. The video has been watched 4.9m times, and Carter was congratulated in the comments, with one person writing “Learning Fafo at an early age: top tier parenting.” Welcome to the parenting trend that doesn’t seem to be disappearing: “Fuck around and find out.”
In another video, when a small child announces he is going to leave home, his mother says “see ya”, shuts the front door behind him, and turns off the outside light – then opens the door to him screaming and pounding to be let back in (it has been liked 1.5m times). He had learned, said his mother, “the meaning of Fafo”.
Calls for independent external inquiry into brutal crackdown that some estimates suggest killed more than 30,000
A deep and painful inquest is under way inside Iran as politicians, academics and the security establishment try to come to terms with what has been described as a catastrophe after the violent protests and their even more violent suppression by the security forces.
The shape of the debate taking place in the heavily censored society is emerging, as selective newspapers and Telegram channels slowly open up to international audiences after the protests – which some estimates suggest could have left more than 30,000 dead – that have stunned many Iranians.
Manners and respect are the norm for kids here. Treating them like a nuisance won’t do anything to help France’s declining birthrate
In French culture, seven is known as “l’âge de raison”, the age at which children know right from wrong and can take some moral responsibility. France’s national rail operator, it seems, puts the age at which a child can be trusted to behave in a non-annoying way onboard a train a bit higher.
In launching its new Optimum plus tariff earlier this month, offering spaces onboard its weekday TGV trains between Paris and Lyon with bigger, more comfortable seats, fancy food and no under-12s, SNCF was trying to appeal to the many business travellers who make that journey. But the move has sparked a backlash and a philosophical debate about the place of children in society, against the backdrop of a worrying decline in French birthrates. “We can’t on one hand say that we are not having enough children and on the other hand try to exclude them from everywhere,” argues Sarah El Haïry, France’s high commissioner for childhood.
Helen Massy-Beresford is a British journalist and editor who lives in Paris
Decisions outsourced, chatbots for friends, the natural world an afterthought: Silicon Valley is giving us life void of connection. There is a way out – but it’s going to take collective effort
Summer after summer, I used to descend into a creek that had carved a deep bed shaded by trees and lined with blackberry bushes whose long thorny canes arced down from the banks, dripping with sprays of fruit. Down in that creek, I’d spend hours picking until I had a few gallons of berries, until my hands and wrists were covered in scratches from the thorns and stained purple from the juice, until the tranquillity of that place had soaked into me.
After saying the US would attack if protesters were harmed, the president appears now to be tying the threat of airstrikes to Iran’s nuclear programme
Donald Trump has warned that Iran must come to the table to negotiate a deal over its nuclear programme or face the possibility of airstrikes and regime change, capping off a month of bellicose posturing and whiplash inducing u-turns from the US president.
The NSW police assistant commissioner, Andrew Holland, said investigators were confident Ingram, 37, may have been helped by “people that he knows in community given the temperatures” of more than 40C recorded in the area.
Lawmakers from both parties have condemned the attack on Ilhan Omar after the Minnesota congresswoman was sprayed with an unknown substance during her town hall on Tuesday night in Minneapolis.
In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, responded to comments from Donald Trump who quipped that “she probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.”
Lawyer for Guan Heng, whose exposed evidence of persecution of Uyghurs, says he is ‘textbook example of why asylum should exist’
A US immigration judge has granted asylum to a Chinese national who he said had a “well founded fear” of persecution if sent back to China after exposing alleged human rights abuses against Uyghurs there.
Guan Heng applied for asylum after arriving in the US illegally in 2021. He has been in custody since being swept up in an immigration enforcement operation in August last year as part of a mass deportation campaign by the Trump administration.
Starmer’s team is wary of spies but such fears are not new – with Theresa May once warned to get dressed under a duvet
When prime ministers travel to China, heightened security arrangements are a given – as is the quiet game of cat and mouse that takes place behind the scenes as each country tests out each other’s tradecraft and capabilities.
Keir Starmer’s team has been issued with burner phones and fresh sim cards, and is using temporary email addresses, to prevent devices being loaded with spyware or UK government servers being hacked into.
Couple killed near Kyiv and apartment block hit while US says territorial issue of Donetsk ‘very difficult’ to resolve. What we know on day 1,436
Russia has hit cities across Ukraine with drones and a missile, killing a couple near the capital of Kyiv one day after five people died in an attack on a passenger train. The attack came ahead of a fresh round of peace talks due at the weekend. Officials said four people, including two children, sought medical attention after the strikes overnight to Wednesday. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the attack on the apartment block, as well as another strike with short-range rockets on what he described as a residential area without military targets in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia. “We will respond fairly to Russia for this and other similar attacks,” he wrote on social media. Russian strikes on other locations across the country included the southern port city of Odesa as well as the central city of Kryvyi Rih.
The territorial issue of Donetsk is “very difficult” to resolve, the US secretary of state has said, saying there is active work under way to reconcile the issue at US-mediated talks to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. “It’s still a bridge we have to cross,” Marco Rubio said on Wednesday. “It’s still a gap, but at least we’ve been able to narrow down the issue set to one central one, and it will probably be a very difficult one,” he told a US Senate foreign relations committee hearing, referring to the eastern Ukrainian region where Moscow wants Kyiv to surrender land. Rubio said the US may the join the new Russia-Ukraine talks this week but that said US participation would be more junior than last week when Donald Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner joined negotiations in Abu Dhabi that were Ukrainian and Russian officials’ first face-to-face talks on Trump’s plan to end the war.
Life will be particularly tough for Ukrainians over the next three weeks due to plunging temperatures and intense Russian attacks on the energy system that have already deprived millions of light and heat, a senior lawmaker said on Wednesday. “The bad news is that there will indeed be frosts, and it will be difficult,” Andriy Gerus, the head of the parliament’s energy committee, told the national TV channel, Marathon. “The good news is that we need to hold out for three weeks, and then it will get easier,” he added, citing predicted warmer temperatures and increased solar power from longer days.
Russian strikes against Odesa have escalated sharply in recent months as conflict centred on the Black Sea has heated up again after it had settled into stalemate, Peter Beaumont reports from the southern Ukrainian city. The biggest recent strike – on 13 December, in which 160 drones and missiles targeted energy infrastructure – left large parts of the city without water and electricity for days on end, marking the beginning of a period of almost daily attacks.
Ukraine has urged the European Union not to be afraid of taking “physical” action against Russia’s “shadow fleet”, pointing to the example of Venezuela-linked oil tankers seized by the US. Visiting Berlin, the Ukrainian presidency’s special representative for sanctions, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, also said on Wednesday that work was still needed on western components found in Russian weapons, which he said was proof that Moscow was circumventing sanctions. Calling for “robust actions”, he said that only increased pressure on Russia could help with negotiations to bring the war to an end. The volume of oil transported in 2025 by Russia’s “shadow fleet” – a flotilla of old oil tankers that aim to get around international sanctions – was the same as the previous year, Vlasiuk said.
The scariest part about getting scammed was not realising it was happening in the first place.
Perhaps naively, I never thought I would be the victim of a cyber scam. I’m reasonably digitally literate and have had it drilled into me to be wary of phishing emails and strange text messages. I’ve even received training at my workplace on how to safeguard yourself against hacking.
The laws have been criticised by tech startups, which say they go too far, and civil society groups, which say they don’t go far enough
South Korea has embarked on a foray into the regulation of AI, launching what has been billed as the most comprehensive set of laws anywhere in the world, that could prove a model for other countries, but the new legislation has already encountered pushback.
The laws, which will force companies to label AI-generated content, have been criticised by local tech startups, which say they go too far, and civil society groups, which say they don’t go far enough.
Add invisible digital watermarks for clearly artificial outputs such as cartoons or artwork. For realistic deepfakes, visible labels are required.
“High-impact AI”, including systems used for medical diagnosis, hiring and loan approvals, will require operators to conduct risk assessments and document how decisions are made. If a human makes the final decision the system may fall outside the category.
Extremely powerful AI models will require safety reports, but the threshold is set so high that government officials acknowledge no models worldwide currently meet it.
Firm’s fourth-quarter 2025 beat expectations as it lavishes investment on AI infrastructure and CEO faces questioning
As Meta spends billions on artificial intelligence data centers and its CEO prepares to testify in a landmark social media trial, the company is earning a pretty penny.
Meta reported strong financial results on Wednesday, beating Wall Street expectations of $58.59bn with $59.89bn in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2025. It reported earnings per share (EPS) of $8.88 – which also surpassed Wall Street expectations of $8.23 in EPS. Meta’s stocks jumped nearly 10% in after-hours trading after the release.
Mike Hawes casts doubt on Labour’s plan to double production by 2035, as Starmer visits China with carmaker delegation
A target of building 1.3m cars a year is likely to be missed unless a large new UK factory is built in the coming years, an industry group has said, as Keir Starmer prepares to hold trade talks in China.
Labour aims to have 1.3m vehicles rolling off production lines by 2035, a central ambition of its industrial strategy. That would nearly double the 764,715 cars and vans made in 2025, according to new data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).
Forget brash statement projects – Riba’s prestigious gold medal has gone to a pivotal figure who works above an Aldi and designs billowing bandstands, jewel-like chapels and buildings that change colour
When Níall McLaughlin was shortlisted for the Stirling prize in 2013, for designing an exquisitely jewel-like chapel for a theological college near Oxford, he brought along his client to the prize-giving ceremony. It was the first (and possibly last) time a group of Anglican nuns had ever graced such a spectacle.
Despite clearly having God on his side, he lost out that year, but eventually scooped the Stirling in 2022, for the New Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Founded in 1428, Magdalene’s alumni include Samuel Pepys, Norman Hartnell and Bamber Gascoigne. Oxbridge colleges expect their buildings to endure, and McLaughlin delivered a reassuringly robust and handsomely detailed exemplar, mixing crisp planes of brick that recalled the American modernist Louis Kahn, with top notes of English Arts and Crafts, echoing the gabled forms of the college’s historic courts.
Australian children’s cartoon series about a family of blue heelers has yet to announce a new season
Australian-made animated series Bluey was the most streamed show in the US for the second year in a row, topping Nielsen’s annual year-end streaming charts for 2025.
US viewers watched 45.2bn minutes of the show on Disney+ according to Nielsen, down from 55.62bn in 2024, but still impressive given the show comprises 154 episodes – most of them less than 10 minutes’ long.
Actor says the defence of his peers and fans was ‘really nice’ after Quentin Tarantino’s scathing assessment calling Dano ‘a weak, weak, uninteresting guy’
Paul Dano has responded to Quentin Tarantino’s scathing criticism of his acting abilities, thanking those who came to his defence after Tarantino called him a “weak, uninteresting guy” and “the limpest dick in the world”.
On Wednesday, Dano told Variety that the supportive responses that poured in from his peers and across social media was touching.
Richard Hetherington forced to play Prince Calàf in Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot after French tenor Roberto Alagna taken ill
In terms of drama at the opera, it will be difficult to surpass Tuesday’s performance of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot after a tenor became unwell leading to a surprise substitution.
A Royal Opera House chief, dressed in a jumper, chinos and trainers, deputised in the lead role after French tenor Roberto Alagna, playing Prince Calàf, became ill after the second act.
High hopes for Optimus robot help company beat forecasts despite yearly revenue decline and flailing car business
In the clearest sign yet that Tesla is pivoting away from its electric car business, CEO Elon Musk announced on Wednesday’s investor call that the company would discontinue production of its Model X SUV and Model S full-size sedan.
“It’s time to basically bring the Model S and X programs to an end,” Musk said. “We expect to wind down S and X production next quarter.”
Anatoliy Trubin scores dramatic goal against Real Madrid
Barça and Sporting in last 16, Bodø/Glimt make playoffs
Goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin scored a 98th-minute header as Benfica defeated Real Madrid 4-2 to secure a Champions League knockout place on Wednesday and deny their opponents an automatic spot in the last 16.
Benfica were heading out despite leading 3-2 with seconds of stoppage time remaining before Trubin met a free-kick to score the goal they needed to get into the playoff round on goal difference.
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