President says Ukrainian forces in east have reclaimed 160 sq km of land and cleared another 170 sq km as counteroffensive ‘achieving results’. What we know on day 1,304

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Ukrainian forces have pushed back some of the gains Russia made over the summer, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said, calling the operation an “important success” after months of battlefield setbacks. The Ukrainian president said his troops had reclaimed 160 sq km (62 sq miles) of land near the eastern coalmining town of Dobropillia, where Russia pierced Ukraine’s defences in August. Russia did not immediately comment on the claims. Zelenskyy said after meeting troops in the eastern Donetsk region on Thursday that his army was “achieving results” in an ongoing counteroffensive there. In addition to reclaiming the 160 sq km, Ukrainian forces had “cleared” Russian troops from an additional 170 sq km of land but had not yet formally taken the territory, he said in a video address. Zelenskyy did not say when Ukraine made the gains but said Russia had “suffered thousands of losses”. DeepState, an online battlefield tracker linked to the Ukrainian army, showed Russian troops made rapid advances near Dobropillia last month but that some of their gains had evaporated in recent weeks. The battlefield reports could not be independently verified.

Donald Trump has accused Vladimir Putin of letting him down in a joint press conference with Keir Starmer during which the US president piled criticism on his Russian counterpart, report Kiran Stacey and Pippa Crerar. Trump said he had hoped to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine soon after entering office but that Putin’s actions had prevented him from doing so. Putin “has let me down”, Trump said. “He’s killing many people, and he’s losing more people than he’s killing. The Russian soldiers are being killed at a higher rate than the Ukrainian soldiers.” His comments on Thursday came during an hour-long press conference alongside the UK prime minister which marked the culmination of a two-day state visit. His comments about Putin will delight British officials who had hoped to use the unprecedented second state visit to isolate the Russian president on the world stage.

A Russian air strike on the Donetsk region town of Kostiantynivka on Thursday killed five people, Ukrainian police said. The town is about 8km from the front line and is surrounded by Russian troops on three sides, according to DeepState. Kyiv has been hitting back with long-range strikes on Russia’s oil sector, with the latest attack on Thursday morning triggering a fire at a refinery in the central Bashkortostan region, about 1,400km from the front. Vladimir Putin said more than 700,000 Russian soldiers were now deployed on the Ukrainian front line.

Russia has responded to a US-based report about the forced re-education of deported Ukrainian children. Yale’s School of Public Health said after an investigation that it had identified more than 210 sites where Ukrainian children have been taken for military training, drone manufacturing and other forced re-education by Russia as part of a large-scale deportation programme. The facilities – across Russia and occupied Ukraine – include camps as well as schools, military bases, medical facilities, religious sites and universities, it said. Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed on Thursday that the report was full of fabrications and based on questionable data. Ukraine says Russia has illegally deported or forcibly displaced more than 19,500 children to Russia and Belarus in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Masculine adequacy is a curse, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Beyond assuring him he meets the standard, could you help him to see the standard doesn’t matter?

My boyfriend sees sex as a competition he is losing. He feels like he doesn’t perform enough (he does) and worries he isn’t big enough (he is!).

He grew up without a father – the father’s fault – and I wonder if this has something to do with it. How can I assist him to see sex as non-competitive? I love him, and I find this self-loathing distressing.

Eleanor says: I assume he doesn’t think he’s losing the competition with you, somehow, but with imagined manly foes, comparisons, symbols of everything he (imagines he) isn’t?

Croft’s recent win the 174km Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc made her the first woman to take out the triple series crown in the prestigious event

Growing up in Stillwater, New Zealand, population 86, Ruth Croft learned hard work from a young age. Her father ran a transport company, managing dozens of drivers and semi-trailers across the 600km West Coast in the South Island.

“On school holidays I worked for my dad full time, sometimes 14-hour days,” says Croft. “Shitty jobs like cleaning drains or the grease bay. I don’t know anyone who works as hard as he does.”

Bridge theatre, London
Ibsen’s mysticism and mermaids are thrown out as director Simon Stone amps up the 1888 play’s psychological intensity with his eco-focused update

Writer-director Simon Stone is known for his rock’n’roll takes on the classics. This is a characteristically high-octane version of Ibsen’s play: loud, modern and led by screen stars Alicia Vikander and Andrew Lincoln. Yet his script, again created in the rehearsal process, retains all of Ibsen’s layers and adds some of its own in the updating.

All mystical talk of the sea and mermaids is excised. The production brings a sharply lit realism to the privileged yet complex family at its heart that seems to be slowly drowning: Ellida (Vikander), as the young, second wife of neurologist Edward (Lincoln), is caught between life with her husband and a long lost, formative ex-lover, Finn (Brendan Cowell), who makes a reappearance. Ellida’s stepdaughters, Hilda (Isobel Akuwudike) and Asa (Gracie Oddie-James), are trying to stay afloat amid grief for their biological mother, who killed herself.

Robertson looks a better bet for Merseyside derby, a fresh test for Bournemouth, protests at West Ham and more

It would be a surprise to see Arne Slot start Milos Kerkez against Everton, given the left-back’s struggles against Burnley last weekend. Kerkez was booked for diving and was lucky to avoid a second yellow after fouling Jaidon Anthony before being substituted for Andy Robertson after 38 minutes at Turf Moor. Surely Slot will not risk a similar performance in the cauldron of the Merseyside derby, especially with such a dependable option in Robertson and the tricky Iliman Ndiaye on the right wing for Everton? “It’s a massive jump [playing for Liverpool],” said the Scot as he came to the defence of Kerkez this week. “I came from Hull City, he’s come from Bournemouth, and it’s probably quite similar. He will be the starting left-back for Liverpool in the future and it’s up to me to push him this season and help him improve.” Kerkez is lucky to have such an experienced mentor, but may face a wait to get back into Slot’s starting XI after Robertson started against Atlético Madrid in midweek. Michael Butler

Analysis reveals 24% of guilty doctors handed suspensions but are allowed to keep working in medicine

UK doctors who are guilty of sexual misconduct are not being appropriately sanctioned due to weak disciplinary processes, research reveals.

Nearly a quarter (24%) of doctors found guilty of sexual misconduct were handed suspensions but allowed to continue working in medicine, according to analysis of fitness to practice tribunals by the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS). This is despite the regulator, the General Medical Council (GMC), recommending they be struck off the medical register.

Experts react with concern that increasing the number of vaccinations required will threaten children’s health

A powerful vaccines committee for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) voted on Thursday to change US vaccine policy and start recommending that children receive multiple vaccines to protect against measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox, instead of a single vaccine that can protect against all four diseases.

The new recommendations from the panel, the advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP), arrived just a day after top former CDC officials said Robert F Kennedy Jr was a threat to US children’s ability to receive vaccines on schedule. The committee’s work typically determines which vaccines are provided free of charge through the US government, shapes state and local laws around vaccine requirements, and influences which vaccines health insurers tend to cover.

Researchers into idea to blend powdered PTFE into food as a zero-calorie filler to curb hunger win chemistry prize

For decades scientists, doctors and public health officials have battled to solve the obesity crisis. Now researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for a radical new approach: slashing people’s calorie intake by feeding them Teflon.

The left-field proposal was inspired by zero calorie drinks and envisaged food manufacturers blending powdered polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) into their products in the hope it would sate people’s hunger before quietly sliding out.

Sorry to my enemies, but little boosts like this help stop me from abandoning my dreams

Moments of brightness are few and far between in our current landscape, but we were lucky enough to experience a couple earlier this week.

If, on Tuesday morning, you heard high-pitched squeals from your neighbourhood, sorry, that was probably me after tuning into the Emmys broadcast just in time to see Jeff Hiller’s name announced. He had won Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for his role as Joel on the beautiful and underrated TV show Somebody Somewhere.

A little over 24 hours before kick-off, Hansi Flick spoke about how lucky he felt to have acquired Marcus Rashford on loan from Manchester United.

Barcelona’s manager was not remotely bothered that the forward’s stock had fallen so far at Old Trafford. Rashford, he said, was a player he had long admired and could help improve.

Pep Guardiola said of drawing Napoli and having Kevin De Bruyne return: “It was always going to happen, right?” He might have spoken, too, of his No 9’s ruthlessness, as Erling Haaland broke this game open with Champions League goal No 50 in a record 49 matches, a feat that handsomely beats Ruud van Nistelrooy’s previous 62-appearance mark.

His strike was a seventh in five for City – form as ominous as the Norwegian’s in the 2022-23 treble season.

• Ace has spent his entire career with Dodgers

• 37-year-old is a three-time Cy Young winner

Clayton Kershaw, one of the greatest pitchers of his generation, will retire at the end of the season.

The 37-year-old is nearing the end of his 18th MLB season, all of which he has spent with the Dodgers.

Brendan Carr says he supports free speech – but has gone after broadcasters he deems are not operating in the ‘public interest’

“The FCC should promote freedom of speech,” Brendan Carr, now the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, wrote in his chapter on the agency in Project 2025, the conservative manifesto that detailed plans for a second Trump administration.

It’s a view he’s held for a long time. He wrote on X in 2023 that “free speech is the counterweight – it is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.”

Lily James plays former Tinder employee who became founder of Bumble in an illuminating yet corny rise-to-fame tale

In 2012, a plucky, headstrong young entrepreneur crashes a startup mixer in Los Angeles, desperately trying to get their big idea off the ground. Naive and ruthlessly ambitious, they brave the skeptics, the losers, the people too good to talk to them and the people who don’t take them seriously. Eventually, inevitably, their genius – obvious, unsinkable, perhaps diabolical – collides with opportunity. Voilà! An origin story is born.

Swap out the date and the city, and this would describe a pivotal scene in any number of recent movies and TV shows that take cinematic interest in the self-mythology of entrepreneurs. The dramatic logic and iconography of the origin story, basically true but always highly glossed, is by now so recognizable it almost writes itself: initial rejection, dogged persistence, chance meeting, lightbulb moment, big break. We’ve seen it in a wave of brand backstory movies – Flamin’ Hot, Air, BlackBerry and Tetris to name a few – as well as the recent boomlet of shows depicting 2010s hustle culture. The twist with Swiped, Hulu’s new film on the founding of online dating titans Tinder and Bumble, is that this founder is a woman.

The cast radiate charm, the storytelling is hugely imaginative and the narrative is irresistibly heartwarming. It’s not the funniest comedy, but it has so much more going for it than just laughs

Mawaan Rizwan began his career as a YouTuber; he later attended the prestigious Paris clown school, École Philippe Gaulier. In Juice, the 33-year-old’s BBC sitcom, he effortlessly unites these disparate comedy training grounds. As the fun-loving commitment-phobe Jamma, Rizwan channels the archetypal man-child vlogger. Puppyish and relatable, he wears his insecurities on his sleeve, and his attempts to conform to the expectations of adulthood are inevitably thwarted. But he is also a figure of more outre fun. With a severe bowl-cut and a penchant for retina-searing fashion, Jamma is overtly ridiculous: a master of slapstick and a magnet for chaos.

In series one, Jamma spent most of his time clowning about: hardly working at a quirky marketing company (with mini trampolines instead of desk chairs) and messing around his sensible therapist boyfriend Guy (Russell Tovey). Now – having been fired from the job and broken up with Guy – he’s crashing with his friend Winnie and working as a clown in a care home. Jamma seems fine with his new gig and more interested in sleeping around than patching things up with lovelorn Guy. But after their paths cross again, he becomes determined to win him back.

• Manchester United 3-0 Brann (Utd win 3-1 on agg)

• Terland 8,13, 62

Manchester United reached the main draw of the Women’s Champions League for the first time after an Elisabeth Terland hat-trick helped them overturn a first-leg deficit to deservedly eliminate the Norwegian side Brann in the third qualifying round.

Terland netted a perfect hat-trick, scoring with her right foot after earlier doing so with her left and nodding in a header, to ensure Marc Skinner’s team will be included in Friday’s draw for the new, 18-team league phase of the competition, along with Chelsea and the holders Arsenal.

More than 3,000 hours of footage filmed since 2018 by a teenager gets turned into a strange, revealing and unsettling look at a fallen star

“What was Kanye West thinking?” has remained a prevailing question since the Grammy award-winning rapper-producer pulled the rip cord on his spectacular descent into rightwing nihilism more than a decade ago. In Whose Name?, a cinéma vérité take on the tortured musical genius (who goes by just Ye now), offers fans and long-term observers a new artifact to pore over in search of answers – and reason to be disappointed all over again.

That’s not a knock on the 104-minute opus, an outcropping of more than 3,000 hours of footage – some of it never before seen, some of it a reverse perspective on the viral stunts and rants that have marked Ye’s dramatic nosedive. Director Nico Ballesteros – who started filming in 2018, at age 18, with nothing to recommend him (his stint as a second assistant director on a Jesus Is King concert video came later) – had sweeping access to Ye and made the distinctive choice not to layer it with any talking-head commentary for context. Mostly, he turns on the camera, holds a tight focus on his subject and lets the rest drift in and out of frame.

Overcoming my terror of new housemates was gradual but by observing them I learned that pythons can be beautiful and clever

Fifteen years ago, while perched on the back deck of my 1920s tin and timber Queenslander home in Brisbane, I realised I was being watched.

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and I spun around to discover a snake dangling from the lattice. Terrified, I rushed inside and locked the door. Clearly, fear is not rational, or I would have understood that serpents don’t have arms.

Brayan Ramos-Brito acquitted after US immigration officials were accused in court of lying about the incident

A Los Angeles protester charged with assaulting a border patrol agent in June was acquitted on Wednesday after US immigration officials were accused in court of lying about the incident.

The not guilty verdict for Brayan Ramos-Brito is a major setback for the Donald Trump-appointed US attorney in southern California and for Gregory Bovino, a border patrol chief who has become a key figure in Trump’s immigration crackdown. The 29-year-old defendant, who is a US citizen, was facing a misdemeanor and was the first protester to go to trial since demonstrations against immigration raids erupted in LA earlier this summer.

The band cited a ‘moral and ethical burden’ placed on artists by revenue from their work ultimately funding lethal technologies

Massive Attack have become the latest act – and first major-label one – to pull their catalogue from Spotify in protest at founder Daniel Ek investing €600m (£520m) in the military AI company Helsing.

In June, Ek’s venture capital firm Prima Materia led the defence tech firm’s latest funding round. Helsing’s software uses AI technology to analyse sensor and weapons system data from battlefields to inform real-time military decisions. It also makes its own military drone, the HX-2. Ek is also chairman of Helsing.

Unconnected to this initiative and in light of the (reported) significant investments by its CEO in a company producing military munition drones and AI technology integrated into fighter aircraft, Massive Attack have made a separate request to our label that our music be removed from the Spotify streaming service in all territories.

In our view, the historic precedent of effective artist action during apartheid South Africa and the apartheid, war crimes and genocide now being committed by the state of Israel renders the No Music for Genocide campaign imperative.

In 1991 the scourge of apartheid violence fell from South Africa, aided from a distance by public boycotts, protests, and the withdrawal of work by artists, musicians and actors. Complicity with that state was considered unacceptable. In 2025 the same now applies to the genocidal state of Israel. As of today, there’s a musician’s equivalent of the recently announced @filmworkers4palestine campaign (signed by 4,500 filmmakers, actors, industry workers & institutions) – it can be found @nomusicforgenocide & supports the wider asks of the growing @bds.movement. We’d appeal to all musicians to transfer their sadness, anger and artistic contributions into a coherent, reasonable & vital action to end the unspeakable hell being visited upon the Palestinians hour after hour.

Double defeat protects Venezuelans with temporary protected status and Guatemalan minors

The Trump administration has been handed a double defeat by judges in immigration cases, barring the executive branch from deporting a group of Guatemalan children and from slashing protections for many Venezuelans in the US.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the administration to refrain from deporting Guatemalan unaccompanied immigrant children with active immigration cases while a legal challenge plays out.

Matthew James Ruth, 24, killed in altercation that left three officers dead and wounded two more

The alleged gunman who killed three officers and wounded two more in southern Pennsylvania before he was killed by police was a 24-year-old being sought on stalking charges, according to court documents and law enforcement.

The violence erupted in rural York county on Wednesday as officers sought Matthew James Ruth, who had also been charged with trespassing, loitering and prowling at night in a domestic-related investigation that began a day earlier, court documents show.

The former lawyer was outspoken about China’s response to the Covid pandemic

A Chinese citizen journalist who was jailed after reporting from the frontlines of the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan is to face trial for a second time, according to human rights activists and media freedom groups.

Zhang Zhan, who was released from prison in May 2024 after serving four years behind bars, is expected to go on trial on Friday at the Shanghai Pudong New Area people’s courtfor “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a catch-all term used to target government critics.

The hyperbole is in sharp contrast to the actual achievements, but in this new era minimising damage and buying time look like wins

An unprecedented second state visit for a US president. An “extra-large” guard of honour. The UK rolled out not only the red carpet, royal welcome and golden carriage but also the superlatives for Donald Trump’s visit. Sir Keir Starmer’s hyperbole on the memorandum of understanding on tech made his guest look almost understated: the prime minister boasted that the transatlantic partnership paved the way for new technologies to “amplify human potential, solve problems, cure diseases, make us richer and freer”.

Yet there was an inverse relationship between the pomp and ceremony of this trip and its real import, between the grand declarations of amity and the actual state of transatlantic ties. The US president soaked up the sycophancy and was obliging enough to hymn the “priceless” relationship. But while Mr Trump grumbled that Vladimir Putin had “really let me down”, he showed no inclination for tougher action against Russia despite Sir Keir’s preposterous remark that the US president had “led the way” on Ukraine and King Charles’s pointed reference – one that his mother might not, perhaps, have made – to Europe and its allies needing to stand together against tyranny.