Former Barclays boss and ex-US Treasury secretary named in versions of will of convicted child sex offender
The former Barclays chief executive Jes Staley and the ex-US Treasury secretary Larry Summers were appointed as executors of Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, according to a newly released tranche of documents linked to the now-deceased child sex offender.
Filings published on Tuesday by the US Department of Justice included various versions of Epstein’s last will and testament, which showed the financier intended to hand responsibility of managing his affairs to associates including the two high-profile men in the event of his death.
Studying chemical chatter as tiny balls of cells embed could shine a light on early pregnancy and glitches that lead to miscarriage
Researchers have created the lining of a womb in a dish, which promises to shed light on the mysterious early stages of human pregnancy and the glitches that can lead to miscarriage and medical complications.
In laboratory experiments, early-stage human embryos donated from couples after IVF treatment successfully implanted into the engineered lining and began to churn out key compounds, such as the hormone that results in a blue line on positive pregnancy tests.
From a show so bananas it could blind people to a classic cartoon that guarantees tears – stars behind the best festive treats on telly reveal what they tune into without fail
Christmas is a time steeped in traditions. And one big tradition that exists in many of our homes over the period revolves around TV: rewatching old favourites, hunkering down for that special you’ve been dying to see or sitting in a post-lunch fugue with a beloved family film. And, as we published last week, there’s a bounty of Christmas telly to get stuck into this year.
But what about people involved in making TV? What do their Christmas viewing habits look like? Here, a variety of actors, writers, directors and comedians – many of whom may be popping up on your screens this year – share their Christmas TV favourites.
Global sales fall by 3% in third consecutive year of decline as distilleries scale back production or expand storage
The Scottish whisky market has slipped into a supply glut as US tariffs and falling demand weigh on the country’s distilleries.
Global scotch sales fell 3% in the first half of 2025, marking the third consecutive year of decline after decades of growth, according to the alcohol data provider IWSR.
Inmates’ escape from DeKalb county jail discovered during routine security check early Monday
Three inmates who escaped from a jail east of Atlanta, including one who was being held on a murder charge, have been apprehended in Florida, a member of a federal fugitive taskforce confirmed.
Eric Heinze, assistant chief inspector with the US Marshals Service Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force, declined to share further details ahead of a news conference planned in Atlanta later on Tuesday.
Chelsea have made an inquiry about signing Antoine Semenyo from Bournemouth. The winger’s deal contains a £65m release clause in January and he is also a target for Liverpool, Manchester City and Manchester United.
Chelsea were not regarded as a likely destination for Semenyo but have contacted the player’s camp to explore the conditions of a deal. There is optimism at Stamford Bridge that the Ghana international will be interested in joining. Chelsea hope Semenyo, who is from London, will appreciate their long-term project and see an opportunity to make an immediate impact at a top club.
The very same immigrants welcomed to the US after risking their lives to fight the Taliban now fear detention or worse
Ali was 25 and a pilot for the Afghan air force, just like his father before him; he arrived at the special mission wing 777 airbase in Kabul around 11am one day in August 2021.
The moment he stepped through the gates, he sensed something was wrong.
After years of fatalities and bizarre incidents, the Georgia reservoir has spawned countless ghost stories. Are they merely legend or the aftereffects of a history steeped in racial trauma?
Kile Glover was the entertainer in the family, the pride of his stepfather, the R&B superstar Usher. He sang, he danced – he burned CDs of his own music, styled the covers with self-made art and was otherwise expressing his creativity in internet videos before it was trendy. “He would’ve been a YouTube sensation by now,” says his mother, the celebrity stylist Tameka Foster. But that future was thwarted on a family trip to Lake Lanier, just outside his Atlanta home town, in July 2012.
Kile was only 11 when he was struck by a speeding jetski while tubing and knocked unconscious. Foster, on the island of Saint Martin at the time, managed to get to Kile’s hospital bedside within hours thanks to Usher sending a private plane – an olive branch that came amid a bitterly public custody battle over their two younger sons. As Kile lay on life support, Foster passed the time Googling for information about Lake Lanier. She is still horrified by what she learned.
Comparing the pictures taken with my camera’s automatic software to those taken with a ‘zero-processing’ app, the results are shocking. Is this a good idea?
I was flicking through a photo album at my grandma’s when I came across a picture of my mum as a child. I took a photo and sent it to her, but on my phone screen, it looked brighter and more vivid than the physical version in my hand.
Adding an Instagram filter is something I would now only do ironically. But is my phone increasing the contrast or making other tweaks without my knowledge? To find out, I downloaded an app with a “zero-processing” feature that claimed to take photos without any software alterations. When comparing the photos my camera takes automatically to the photos taken with this app, the results were shocking. The so-called “raw” photos that lack processing had subtle, muted colours, softer edges – a little grainy – while the processed photos were gorgeous and crisp like the inside of a marble. Why were they so different?
As chief of staff, she has stifled her temptation to intervene time and time again
Susie Wiles has the gimlet eye of an alcoholic’s daughter. She is always on edge, vigilant to the slightest movement, fearful of sudden danger, and has learned to withdraw herself from the chaos in order to survive. She is keenly observant, sees through people around her who are not drinkers to decipher their underlying motives that might flare into unexpected menace, and practiced in passive aggression of which her interview with Vanity Fair is a classic case study.
Wiles defines herself as the child of a raging drunk and it is through that singular lens of her formative experience that she defines her current boss. “I make a specialty of it,” she told the writer Christopher Whipple for his Vanity Fair profile of the Trump White House chief of staff in one of the eleven interviews she granted him. Donald Trump, she stated, “has an alcoholic’s personality,” though he does not drink. She didn’t stop there, but elaborated that “high-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Trump, she said, “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Saying Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality” reveals Wiles’ personal understanding about a megalomaniacal celebrity who fosters pandemonium around himself without any care for others. Her father, Pat Summerall, the great football placekicker and the play-by-play broadcaster of National Football League games on CBS for 40 years, was the original bad daddy. “Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me,” she said. She remembered him as a mostly absentee father and so drunk he “wouldn’t recognize” his granddaughter, which Wiles thought “horrifying.” Alcoholism, she said, is a “disease that clouds your judgment,” and no one, however smart they think they are can “out think addiction.” In 1992, Wiles and her mother staged an intervention to take him to the Betty Ford Drug Rehab Center. She gave him a letter reading, “Dad, the few times we’ve been out in public together recently, I’ve been ashamed we shared the same last name.” That is what she means when she says someone has an “alcoholic’s personality.”
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist
Demand for CD players rises 74% this year amid deluxe releases from artists such as Taylor Swift and Pink Floyd
Forget the vinyl revival. CD players and compact discs are back on Christmas lists this year amid a wave of 90s nostalgia and coveted “deluxe” releases from big acts such as Taylor Swift and Pink Floyd.
Demand for compact discs peaked in the mid-00s and many households ditched their systems and libraries as digital music took off. But the distinctive whirr is returning to bedrooms around the country, with retailers and marketplaces experiencing an uptick in appetite for vintage tech and music to play on it.
A disturbing letter that appears to have been written by Jeffrey Epstein and sent to Larry Nassar, the US Olympics gymnastics team doctor convicted of sexual abuse, is included the latest batch of Epstein-related documents released by the US government.
“As you will know by now, I have taken the ‘short route’ home,” the letter, which appears to have been signed from Epstein to Nasser, reads. “Good luck! We shared one thing … our love & caring for young ladies and the hope they reach their full potential.”
1 min Peep peep! Senegal kick off from left to right as we watch.
Full time: DR Congo 1-0 Benin Theo Bongonda’s goal has given DR Congo victory in the opening game of Group D. They play Senegal next on Saturday; Benin will meet Botswana.
Son of jailed former Brazilian president says spokesperson for ‘national symbol’ sandals is ‘openly left wing’
Leaderless since its figurehead was jailed for attempting a coup, Brazil’s far right has found a new nemesis: the flip-flop brand Havaianas, which has been “cancelled” by Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters over a television advert.
The controversy stems from the actor Fernanda Torres – the star of I’m Still Here, the Brazilian film that won an Oscar for best international feature – saying in the ad that she hoped audiences would not start 2026 “on the right foot”, but “with both feet”.
I would never want them to feel that they had been naughty if I couldn’t afford their gifts one year
In my house, Christmas Day looks very normal. My boys will wake me up at the crack of dawn then tumble downstairs, falling over each other, to find presents under the tree. As the tearing of wrapping paper cross-fades into screams of excitement, for a moment, everything feels exactly as it should. Except for one subtle difference: my children have never believed in Santa.
This isn’t the result of an “I don’t want to lie to my children” ideology or some Scroogist attempt to be different. It’s a deliberate choice I have made, one that is rooted in fear. Behind the fairy lights and goodwill of Christmas lurk financial demands that many families cannot meet. According to a YouGov poll for debt charity Step Change earlier this month, about one in three adults with children will struggle to afford Christmas this year. For many, the festive season brings anxiety, overdrafts and guilt rather than joy.
Matt Taylor is a writer, music producer and author of the Underclass Hero Substack newsletter
The 1960 film about a downtrodden insurance worker and his burgeoning crush is full of staccato repartee and unforgettable jokes. It’s barely aged a day
For romantic comedies and Christmas movies alike, a little misery can go a long way. No one understood this balancing act more than Billy Wilder, whose films ran the gamut from bottomless cynicism (Ace in the Hole) to gender-bending farce (Some Like it Hot). His 1960 film The Apartment splits the difference.
Like another yuletide classic, Carol, the film finds inspiration in David Lean’s Brief Encounter, which depicts an extramarital affair briefly consummated in the bed of a friend’s apartment. In an old interview, Wilder says he was compelled by a character “who comes back home and climbs into the warm bed the lovers just left”, and so The Apartment’s hero, CC “Bud” Baxter, was born.
She won an Emmy for her electric performance in the Netflix smash hit, but the casting process wasn’t exactly hiccup-free. The actor opens up about a year of success, struggle – and how she nearly became a footballer
For a while, Erin Doherty ignored Stephen Graham’s calls. Not deliberately, she stresses with a laugh. “I’m just really bad at my phone. I’m such a technophobe, and he knew that,” she says. They had made the Disney+ show A Thousand Blows together, in which Doherty plays an East End crime boss in Victorian London, and Graham had talked about an idea he wanted to dramatise, about a teenage boy who is catastrophically radicalised by online misogyny. A couple of months after they’d wrapped A Thousand Blows, Graham and his wife and producing partner, Hannah Walters, kept trying to get in touch. “I was getting voice notes from him and Hannah being like, ‘Erin, pick up your phone!’” Doherty’s girlfriend told her to ring him back and Graham offered her the role in Adolescence. She said yes on the spot, without reading the script.
Since it was screened on Netflix in March, Adolescence has had nearly 150m views. It sparked a huge cultural conversation; it was shown in secondary schools and its creators were invited to Downing Street. Did they have any idea it would become such a phenomenon? “No, and I’m not sure you’re supposed to,” says Doherty when we speak. She is chatty and down-to-earth, even in the year her career went stellar. As well as starring in A Thousand Blows, her role in Adolescence – as Briony Ariston, a psychologist – won her an Emmy for best supporting actress. “But you do know when you’re a part of something that’s good and deserves to be seen, and we knew that about it. I think because it came from such a genuine place, a place of real purity and rawness, it [fed into] the making of it. From day one, it had that electricity.”
Throughout his career, Al Chapman has spent several months cooking “on ice” – that is, in Antarctica. During the summer of 2021-22, the chef was one of three kitchen crew stationed at Scott Base, New Zealand’s only Antarctic research station. The dining hall was the hub of social activity, serving breakfast, morning tea, lunch and dinner for up to 85 people at its peak. It’s like working in a restaurant, says Chapman – one where you can sometimes see penguins from the kitchen.
Speaking of penguins: Chapman is adamant they aren’t eaten, unlike in the early days of Antarctic exploration. Not just because they’re protected under the Antarctic treaty, or that starvation is no longer a serious concern; Chapman says it’s important to serve food people like, especially when they’re working in such an isolated part of the world, in extreme conditions.
The beautiful despair of Cameron Winter, the perfectly imperfect life of Lily Allen, the maximalist R&B of Dijon and more: here’s what our readers have had on heavy rotation • The 50 best albums of 2025
The production is uniquely rhythmic and layered, the instrumental performances are all pretty bulletproof, and Cameron Winter’s writing is just ridiculously good. He is able to show us beauty and despair, and the beauty in despair and the despair in beauty. The best track to me is Islands of Men, which builds over this hypnotic instrumental while Winter sings about isolation and self-illusion. Other highlights would be the title track and Half Real, which feels like a dizzy, intoxicated folk song. Geese are the next big thing. Freddie, 18, Surrey
The actor has been doing it all to sell his 50s-set ping-pong epic but, as a year of A-list flops shows, there’s no formula for guaranteed success
On 15 November, without prior announcement, one of the defining comedies of the year was posted to Timothée Chalamet’s Instagram account. Captioned only “video93884728.mp4”, the 18-minute video at first appeared to be a leaked Zoom call in which the Oscar-nominated actor pitched marketing ideas for the movie Marty Supreme to bemused staff at the indie production house A24. It might take a few minutes, and at least one shock interjection of “schwap!” from the very serious-seeming star, to realize that it’s a joke. Well, sort of – the meta video, in which an egomaniacal Chalamet proposes they “highlight international cooperation” by painting both the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower a “very specific shade orange”, satirizes the tedium of movie marketing desperate to get people in seats, while also introducing a harebrained marketing strategy that’s unabashedly thirsty to get people in seats.
The “leak” heralded an unconventional and extremely committed press campaign for Josh Safdie’s 50s-set ping-pong epic that has turned movie marketing – so often formulaic, cloying or apathetic – into eye-catching performance art. “Movie marketing is trying to be passive, trying to be chic,” Chalamet says in the video, for which he wrote the script. “We’re not trying to be chic.”
Ownership of Frauen-Bundesliga is being taken over by the clubs, who want to keep pace with game in England
“The reason we started this whole process was a fear of losing more and more the connection to the top,” says Katharina Kiel, the head of women’s football at Eintracht Frankfurt.
Alongside her role at one of Germany’s more successful women’s football teams, Kiel was this month elected president of the new Women’s Bundesliga Association, after all 14 clubs agreed to split from the German Football Federation (DFB) and form their own committee to take ownership of the league to further commercialise and grow it, with the 2027-28 campaign a targeted start date.
A man identified as “A” who appears to be Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor discussed facilitating meetings with “inappropriate friends” with Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
Among the latest tranche of Epstein files are email exchanges in 2001 and 2002 between Maxwell and a correspondent who appears as “The Invisible Man” in the email thread and says he is writing from Balmoral, the royal residence in the Scottish Highlands.
Bill C-12 includes many changes around border security along with new ineligibility rules for refugee claimants
Canada’s Liberal government is pushing through sweeping new legislation targeting refugees that observers fear will usher in a new era of US-style border policies, fueling xenophobia and the scapegoating of immigrants.
Bill C-12, or Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act, includes many changes around border security along with new ineligibility rules for refugee claimants.
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