Institute for Fiscal Studies director says chancellors continue to ‘shy away from meaningful tax reform that could move the dial’

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The Conservative party is attacking the budget on the grounds that Rachel Reeves is putting up taxes supposedly to fund more spending on benefit claimants. Even though the rationale for this claim is questionable, the Tories were making it before the budget was announced, and Kemi Badenoch firmed it up last night, claiming it was a “Benefits Street budget”.

On LBC this morning, asked if the budget meant “alarm clock Britain paying for Benefits Street”, Reeves said she did not accept that. She said 60% of the families that would benefit from the removal of the two-child benefit cap (the most expensive welfare announcement in the budget) were in work.

I don’t think children should be punished by this pernicious policy any longer. And the cost to society of this is huge, the cost for councils of temporary accommodation, when people can no longer afford the rent, putting families in B&Bs, kids having to move to school all the time because parents have moved from B&B to another lot of temporary accommodation, and there’s costs for years to come, because all the evidence shows that kids that are growing up poor are less likely to get into work and more reliant on the welfare state in the future for them.

So this is a good investment in those kids, to give them the chances that I want for my kids, and everyone wants for their kids. It also saves money for taxpayers on that accommodation, on those additional health costs, and ensuring that those kids grow up to be productive adults.

The food’s better, the price is better and the company is better. You know where you are at a proper caff

Early some mornings, when I’m working in London, I go for breakfast with two good friends. So that’s me, a fabric dealer and a psychotherapist. Obviously this sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it’s one for which, at the time of writing, I have no punchline. Soho’s our hunting ground, the hunt in question being for somewhere to have breakfast at 7am. There’s not much open at that time. I mean, it’s not asking for much, is it? Somewhere to sit and eat at what is hardly a punishingly early hour.

Being gentlemen of a certain age, we also require access to a toilet, which narrows our options still further. What this leaves us with is the grand total of four establishments. Three are fancy restaurants; one isn’t.

Twenty years after the first face transplant, patients are dying, data is missing, and the experimental procedure’s future hangs in the balance

In the early hours of 28 May 2005, Isabelle Dinoire woke up in a pool of blood. After fighting with her family the night before, she turned to alcohol and sleeping tablets “to forget”, she later said.

Reaching for a cigarette out of habit, she realized she couldn’t hold it between her lips. She understood something was wrong.

If support for Israel is no longer de rigueur in New York, it may soon not be obligatory in Washington. That is good news for Palestinians

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be quaking in his boots at the decisive victory of Zohran Mamdani in the 4 November New York City mayoral election. Not because of absurd allegations of antisemitism for which there is no evidence, but because Mamdani has broken the longstanding taboo for successful New York candidates against criticizing the Israeli government. And he has only reinforced his approach in the month since his election.

New York has the largest Jewish population in the United States – and the second-largest of any city in the world after Tel Aviv. The longstanding assumption was that many Jewish voters prioritized the defense of the Israeli government over other issues, so criticism of Israel would set them against a politician.

Figure of 204,000 in 12 months to June 2025 is lowest since 2021, statistics body says

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Net migration to the UK has fallen by more than two-thirds to 204,000 in a single year, the lowest annual figure since 2021, according to the latest official statistics.

Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show there was a 69% drop from 649,000 in the number of people immigrating minus the number of people emigrating, in the year to June 2025.

The company is being sued under the new Elvis act, which protects a person’s voice from exploitation without consent

The estate of Johnny Cash is suing Coca-Cola for illegally hiring a tribute act to impersonate the late US country singer in an advertisement that plays between college football games.

The case has been filed under the Elvis Act of Tennessee, made effective last year, which protects a person’s voice from exploitation without consent. The estate said that while it has previously licensed Cash’s songs, Coca-Cola did not approach them for permission in this instance.

Now a hugely popular photographic genre, many women pay thousands to have intimate portraits taken of themselves by a professional. What do they get out of it?

A few hours into Brittany Witt’s boudoir shoot, with the mimosas kicking in and the music going strong, the photographer asked: “How do we feel about some completely nude photos?” Witt was lying on the bed in lingerie, in a studio in Texas, and hadn’t considered nudity an option. “I was like: ‘OK, we’re on this trust path.’” She undressed. The photographer, JoAnna Moore, covered Witt with body oil and squirted her with water, then asked her “to crawl across the floor with my full trust,” Witt says. “I did so. The pose was nude, and it was completely open. I wasn’t covered with a sheet. It was all out, it was all open, and it brought that worst level of self-doubt. I was terrified.”

Witt, 33, has come to see that terror as an important part of her experience. She used to be a competitive weightlifter. “I had a very masculine aura. I showed up in strength,” she says. At school and work – in the construction side of the oil and gas industry – she was “type A – scheduler, planner, had everything together, kind of led the group”. A turbulent home life when she was growing up led her to develop robust protection mechanisms which, in adulthood, acted as a block to relationships – issues she had been addressing with a life coach. But in that moment, on all-fours in Moore’s studio: “I felt those protections stripped away. There was nothing to hide behind, literally, figuratively.”

• Gray pleased team scored three goals in Paris

• He praises ‘helpful’ individual plans from coaches

Archie Gray believes Tottenham can take a number of positives from Wednesday night’s 5-3 Champions League defeat at Paris Saint-Germain despite describing the result as “not good enough.”

The pre-match talk at the club had been about effecting a reset after Sunday’s 4-1 derby humbling at Arsenal to boost confidence for Saturday’s home game against Fulham. Spurs are desperate for a victory at their stadium having won only once there in the league this season under Thomas Frank. More broadly, their home league record shows three victories in 20 matches.

Documentary series of Interview with the Vampire writer available to stream with potential for further releases

The worst heartbreak and most riveting triumph of Anne Rice’s life happened in relatively quick succession, each beginning when the US novelist’s daughter – Michele, then about three – told her she was too tired to play.

Rice had never heard such a comment from a child that age, and subsequent blood tests ordered by a doctor revealed that her beloved “Mouse” had acute granulocytic leukemia, considered untreatable for her.

A new documentary charts how a song that featured a 335lb rapper and bad dancing went viral in the pre-internet era

The Chicago Bears are 8-3 and soaring in this season’s NFL standings. For a fanbase that’s grown accustomed to looking up at the division rival Green Bay Packers and looking ahead to the next season’s prospects, it’s reason to smell the roses and indulge in some light strutting. But even as fans find themselves looking forward to the Bears’ first playoff berth in five years, something that once seemed unthinkable with a second-year quarterback and a rookie head coaching helming a squad that managed only five wins last year, no fan is thinking the 2025 Bears have a Super Bowl run in them – not without a rap song to lay the marker down.

Before the 1985 edition of the Bears romped to victory in Super Bowl XX, they tempted fate by recording The Super Bowl Shuffle. Although the song only peaked at 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, the accompanying video came to rival Michael Jackson’s Thriller for popularity as it popped up endlessly on TV during the Bears’ title run. “The Super Bowl Shuffle went viral in an age where there was no viral existence like we know it today,” the song’s recording engineer, Fred Breitberg, says. “It was a phenomenal entity as well as being a good record.”

Diplomatic row worsens after US president says member state will not be invited to 2026 summit

Donald Trump has said that South Africa will not be invited to G20 events in the United States when it presides over the forum next year, a measure the African nation described as “punitive”.

The US president repeated widely discredited claims that South Africa is “killing white people”, extending a diplomatic row between the countries after the US boycotted the summit in Johannesburg last weekend.

• McCullum books extra time in nets before second Test

• Australian captain Cummins may return from injury

A week of inactivity for England’s cricketers will end on Saturday following confirmation of additional training sessions having been scheduled in the wake of their howling eight-wicket defeat to Australia in the first Ashes Test.

As reported by the Guardian on Monday, head coach Brendon McCullum has booked extra time in the nets ahead of the day-night second Test that starts in Brisbane on 4 December rather than send any first team players to the two-day England Lions match in Canberra this weekend.

Viewers unable to watch episodes of long-awaited final series on TV when the streaming service briefly froze

When Netflix crashed within minutes of releasing Stranger Things series five, it felt like a plot twist worthy of the sci-fi show itself.

Viewers were left unable to stream the opening episodes of the long-awaited final series, with many voicing their frustration on social media platforms.

While fewer women than men are incarcerated, their numbers are rising faster and most often for non-violent offences

• Experts warn of ‘global crisis’ as number of women in prison nears one million

More than 733,000 women and girls are held in penal institutions globally, according to the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research, either as pre-trial detainees or remand prisoners, or having been convicted and sentenced. The actual total is thought to be much higher, as figures for five countries are not available and those for China are incomplete.

This nebulous study of Luigi Mangione veers close to romanticising him as a latter-day Robin Hood

On 5 December 2024, the New York Times ran the headline “Insurance CEO Gunned Down In Manhattan”. The newspaper then noted that Brian Thompson was “shot in the back in Midtown Manhattan by a killer who then walked coolly away”. The murder in broad daylight was indeed both cold and shocking. But many Americans had a different response: for those who had been denied health insurance or faced exorbitant healthcase costs, the news felt cathartic. Social media blew up. One post read: “All jokes aside … no one here is the judge of who deserves to live or die. That’s the job of the AI algorithm the insurance company designed to maximize profits on your health.”

Five days later, Luigi Mangione, a good-looking, 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate with a master’s in computer science, was apprehended at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He awaits trial on federal and state charges of murder, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty. So who is Mangione? And what might have motivated the alleged crime? These are the questions John H Richardson attempts to answer in an investigation that explores broader themes, too.

Hamad thinks his method enhances the flavour. Lucia says he’s breaking all the sacred rules. Who needs to wake up and smell the coffee?

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Hamad’s method isn’t the way it’s supposed to be done. I’m Italian – I know all about good coffee

Pressing down the grounds improves the flavour. Lucia is just being a coffee snob

An enraged behemoth breaks free from a government black site bent on revenge, but there is not much here aside from some monster action

‘We’re going to need more wallpaper” turns out to be the Nordic answer to “We’re going to need a bigger boat”, after a 50-metre troll has just swept a leg through someone’s soon-to-be-renovated house. When the quips revolve around interior design, you know Norwegian big-budget film-making is taking a softer path than its raucous American inspirations.

This is a Netflix sequel to Norwegian horror comedy Troll with the original director Roar Uthaug returning, and home is clearly a theme dear to the franchise’s heart. The first film’s Scandi-kaiju was returning to its roots, on a mission to trash Oslo. But the new “megatroll” – looking like Danny McBride in the throes of a full-body fungal infection – is headed for Trondheim, bent on revenging itself on the nation’s founding father and chief troll-scourge, King Olaf. Trollogist Nora (Ine Marie Wilmann) and ministerial adviser Andreas (Kim Falck) return, again trying to hold the authorities back from simply lighting up the enraged behemoth after it escapes from a government black site.

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

US group Dekleptocracy identifies chemicals used for military vehicles’ lubricants and tyres as potential vulnerabilities

A US group has identified several obscure but potentially key sanctions it says could seriously disrupt Russia’s war effort in Ukraine after last month’s targeting of the Kremlin’s biggest oil firms.

Previous rounds of sanctions have been applied to Russian energy companies, banks, military suppliers and the “shadow fleet” of ships carrying Russian oil.

Anastasia Samoylova took a photographic journey up the US east coast – and found herself in America’s unreconciled past just as much as its fragmented present

A series of walking festivals and cultural programmes aim to lure visitors to the Algarve’s woodland interiors and pretty villages to help boost tourism year round

‘I never mind doing the same walk over and over again,” said our guide, Joana Almeida, crouching beside a cluster of flowers. “Each time, there are new things – these weren’t here yesterday.” Standing on stems at least two centimetres tall and starring the dirt with white petals, the fact these star of Bethlehem flowers sprung up overnight was a beautiful testament to how quickly things can grow and regenerate in this hilly, inland section of the Algarve, the national forest of Barão de São João. It was also reassuring to learn that in an area swept by forest fires in September, species such as strawberry trees (which are fire-resistant thanks to their low resin content) were beginning to bounce back – alongside highly flammable eucalyptus, which hinders other fire-retardant trees such as oak. Volunteers were being recruited to help with rewilding.

Visitor numbers to the Algarve are growing, with 2024 showing an increase of 2.6% on the previous year – but most arrivals head straight for the beach, despite there being so much more to explore. The shoreline is certainly wild and dramatic but the region is also keen to highlight the appeal of its inland areas. With the development of year-round hiking and cycling trails, plus the introduction of nature festivals, attention is being drawn to these equally compelling landscapes, featuring mountains and dense woodlands. The Algarve Walking Season (AWS) runs a series of five walking festivals with loose themes such as “water” and “archaeology” between November and April. It’s hoped they will inspire visitors year round, boosting the local economy and helping stem the tide of younger generations leaving in search of work.

Number of women incarcerated around the world rising at nearly three times the rate of men, with female prisoners often subjected to sexual violence and forced labour

• Explainer: How many women are in prison and on death row around the world? – in charts

Up to a million women worldwide are facing sexual violence and forced labour in prisons, where they are overlooked and forgotten, in what is being called a growing global crisis.

The number of incarcerated women is rising much faster than men and is expected to surpass one million on current trends. While on average women account for between 2% and 9% of national prison populations, since 2000 the number imprisoned has grown by 57%, compared with a 22% increase in the men’s prison population.

The reader grapples with fascism and complicity through the eyes of a mute autistic girl being treated during the second world war

As I started reading Alice Jolly’s new novel, whose narrator is a mute autistic girl in wartime Vienna, I realised that I was resisting its very premise. I am generally sceptical about books that use child narrators to add poignancy to dark plots, or novels that use nazism as a means of introducing moral jeopardy to their characters’ journeys. And yet by the end Jolly had won me over. This is a book that walks a tightrope between sentimentality and honesty, between realism and imagination, and creates something spirited and memorable as it does so.

We meet our fierce narrator, Adelheid Brunner, when she is brought into a children’s hospital by her grandmother, who cannot cope with the little girl’s fixations. Adelheid is obsessed with the matchboxes of the title, which she is constantly studying, ordering and occasionally discarding. In the hospital, she finds that she and her fellow child inmates are the object of obsessive study in turn by their doctors – sometimes understood, sometimes valued, and then, tragically, sometimes discarded.

President calls the shooting in Washington an ‘act of terror’, as officials name Rahmanullah Lakanwal as suspected shooter

Donald Trump has called for his government to re-examine every Afghan immigrant who entered the US during Joe Biden’s administration, after law enforcement officials identified the suspect in the shooting of two national guard members in Washington as a man from Afghanistan.

A statement from the Department of Homeland Security named the suspect asRahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national who entered the US under a Biden-era policy allowing Afghans set up after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Immigration authorities granted Lakanwal asylum earlier this year, according to CNN.