Governments across the continent have attacked green rules with increasing ferocity – all while professing their commitment to existing climate targets

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To little fanfare and few international headlines, Denmark just announced one of the world’s most ambitious climate targets.

The unusually wind-powered and cycle-friendly Nordic nation – whose ruling Social Democrats suffered a setback in elections on Tuesday – promised on Monday to cut planet-heating pollution by at least 82% by 2035 from 1990 levels. The goal inches past the UK’s landmark 81% target for that year and races ahead of the EU’s rather wide goal of 66.3% to 72.5%.

Whether it’s vibe-setting dance and rap for house parties or soothing dream-pop for when you’re contemplating the clear-up, reach for these ready-made playlists

Let’s face it: when everyone’s two improvised cocktails deep, they’ll be hollering for Pink Pony Club, and after two more, they’ll be doing Fairytale of New York in a male-female karaoke face-off. But for the early part of the party, here’s some 2025 pop, dance and rap to keep the mood buoyant.

The actor said he wrote wishing 11-year-old Dominic McLaughlin ‘an even better time’ growing up in the role than he had

Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe said that he wrote to 11-year-old actor Dominic McLaughlin, who has been cast in the title role of the new Harry Potter TV series.

Radcliffe appeared on Good Morning America on Tuesday and said: “I wouldn’t say that anyone who is going to play Harry has to [call me],” adding: “I wrote to Dominic and I sent him a letter and he sent me a very sweet note back.”

Starbucks union threatens to expand campaign as politicians like Zohran Mamdani back striking workers

Unionized Starbucks workers are threatening to expand a US strike against the world’s biggest coffee chain into “the largest and longest” in the company’s history – and urging customers to steer clear.

Starbucks has said the vast majority of its cafes remain open, and expressed disappointment that Starbucks Workers United launched the strike.

Former Met officer convicted of offences in pattern of ‘horrific’ offending dating back 35 years

Ex-police officer David Carrick has been found guilty of molesting a 12-year-old girl and raping a former partner in a pattern of “horrific” offending dating back 35 years.

Carrick, 50, who served as an armed officer in the Metropolitan police, sexually assaulted the child in the late 1980s. More than 20 years later, he repeatedly raped a woman and subjected her to “degrading and humiliating” abuse during the course of a toxic relationship.

Bill Ackman thinks his pickup line could aid population rates. Given the track record of the mega-rich, it may do the opposite

Sit down and pay attention, because this column might change your life. I bring you tidings from the Nazi-filled wilderness that is now X, where Maga-adjacent billionaire Bill Ackman has generously decided to dispense romantic advice to the masses. Online culture, Ackman notes, has “destroyed the ability to spontaneously meet strangers”. The antidote to this, he suggests, are four simple words.

“May I meet you?”

The use of AI in the surprise game-of-the-year contender has sparked a heated cultural and ethical debate, and raised existential questions for artists, writers and voice actors

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Arc Raiders is, by all accounts, a late game-of-the-year contender. Dropped into a multiplayer world overrun with hostile drones and military robots, every human player is at the mercy of the machines – and each other. Can you trust the other raider you’ve spotted on your way back to humanity’s safe haven underground, or will they shoot you and take everything you’ve just scavenged? Perhaps surprisingly, humanity is (mostly) choosing to band together, according to most people I’ve talked to about this game.

In a review for Gamespot, Mark Delaney paints a beguiling picture of Arc Raiders’s potential for generating war stories, and highlights its surprisingly hopeful tone as the thing that elevates it above similar multiplayer extraction shooters: “We can all kill each other in Arc Raiders. The fact that most of us are choosing instead to lend a helping hand, if not a sign that humanity will be all right in the real world, at the very least makes for one of the best multiplayer games I’ve ever played.”

From pyrotechnics in Perth to the denouement in Sydney, our team of writers outline their hopes and fears for the five Tests

Ali Martin A full-blooded Ashes tour – both sets of supporters in the stands watching a hard-fought contest – after the pandemic proved something of a buzzkill four years ago.

The hot spot seemed the perfect place for Yuletide-loving royalists. But, as with the Eiffel Tower in Beijing and some of the most picturesque windmills in the Netherlands, there was much less to it than first met the eye ...

Name: Buckingham Palace Christmas market.

Age: Brand new this year.

In August, Donald Trump started a campaign of aggression against Venezuela. The US president first launched airstrikes on alleged drug boats off the coast of the South American country – a move largely condemned as extrajudicial killings – then deployed US naval assets in the Caribbean. The Guardian's Latin America correspondent, Tom Phillips, explains why the claims the targeted boats were carrying drugs destined for the US are dubious and what Trump's actions could mean for the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro

• Venezuela’s Maduro urges Trump to avoid Afghanistan-style ‘forever war’

Move welcomed by critics, who have been calling for end to ‘morally unacceptable’ deals since 2016

The British Museum has ended a controversial sponsorship deal with a Japanese tobacco firm after reports that the government had raised questions about the deal, which some critics said was “deeply troubling”.

The Guardian understands that the museum’s board chose to not renew the 15-year partnership with Japan Tobacco International (JTI), which ended in September.

Exclusive: The 31-year-old had dozens of interactions with support services and police before her death at the hands of a dangerous man. Her family now wants answers

• Warning: This article contains the name and image of an Indigenous Australian who has died

• Meet the whistleblowers who exposed Queensland’s domestic violence failures

• Read more from Guardian Australia’s two-year investigation here

Neighbours had heard a woman crying at the house on McGill Street.

In the first few days of December 2019, things “got bad again” behind the high fences at the property south of Ipswich. The abuse became more frequent. A man’s voice screaming; a woman sobbing, trying to calm him, pleading to be left alone.

Exclusive: Images are first indication that Israel has used cluster munitions in nearly 20 years

Israel used widely banned cluster munitions in its recent 13-month war in Lebanon, photos of munition remnants in south Lebanon seen by the Guardian suggest.

The images, which have been examined by six different arms experts, appear to show the remnants of two different types of Israeli cluster munitions found in three different locations: south of the Litani River in the forested valleys of Wadi Zibqin, Wadi Barghouz and Wadi Deir Siryan.

If you’re an urban creature like me, you can go country-coded while staying aware you’re essentially playacting. The trick is not going OTT

Once a decade or so, the urban-centric fashion world discovers this delightful concept called The Countryside. With the vanishingly scant levels of self-awareness that are fashion’s default setting, it then proceeds to immediately and loudly tell the world about it. There are so many trees! Don’t you just love trees? Especially at this time of year when the leaves are lovely tasteful colours, great for selfies, very flattering to the complexion. The pubs are absolutely charming. Sometimes they even have sourdough.

Here we go again. It began with hiking boots, a couple of years ago. Last winter, the barn jacket was suddenly, inexplicably everywhere, and this season is wall-to-wall Fair Isle jumpers. Dressing like you are on a cosy mini-break is to autumn what dressing for a festival field is to summer: a version of countryside dressing conceived by someone who leaves the city for no more than 48 hours at a time. It is possibly not even a million miles from cultural appropriation. And at this point I need to hold my hands up and say: I’m as bad as any of them. I love the countryside but I, in my cold hard heart, am an urban creature, really.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Ukraine to raise the overnight attack on Ternopil, in which more than 70 people were injured, at the security council tomorrow

The Dutch economy minister said he had moved to take effective control of Nexperia to ensure Europe was not locked out of chip production “in an emergency”.

He said the decision to lift the legal move to prevent Nexperia from moving intellectual property and physical assets from its European factory in Hamburg and its corporate headquarters in Nijmegen was the “right step” after consultation with the European Commission and others.

“The Netherlands has considered it the right moment to take a constructive step by suspending the order under the Goods Availability Act, in close consultation with European and international partners. The Netherlands will continue to engage in constructive dialogue with the Chinese authorities in the period ahead.”

When Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath invented the visual language of Isotypes, it was to democratise education. As a new exhibition shows, it ended up influencing pop art, graphic design and electronic musicians from Kraftwerk to OMD

When Otto Neurath died in Oxford some 80 years ago, far away from his native Vienna, he was still finding his feet in exile. Like many a Jewish refugee, the economist, philosopher and sociologist had been interned as a suspected enemy alien on the Isle of Man, along with his third wife and close collaborator Marie Reidemeister, having chanced a last-minute life-saving escape from their interim hideout in the Netherlands across the Channel in a rickety boat in 1940.

Thanks to Neurath’s pioneering use of pictorial statistics – or “Isotypes” as Reidemeister called them, an acronym for “International System of Typographic Picture Education” – he left behind an enormous legacy in the arts and social sciences: it is the language through which we decode and analyse the modern world. But his lasting relevance would have been hard to predict at the time of his death at the age of 63.

When a prankster meets a puncher it’s not about sport but an elaborate viral hoax that keeps us wanting more

“If it’s all straight up and proper, you would worry that he takes this kid’s head off,” reckons Barry McGuigan. “Could get his jaw broke, his head smashed in, side of his head caved in, God forbid he could get a brain bleed,” says Carl Froch on his YouTube channel. “It could be the end of him. It could be his last day on Earth,” David Haye tells Sky News, with the sort of apocalyptic glare I try to give my children when they want to jump in a muddy puddle.

Yes, this week everyone appears to be deeply concerned for the wellbeing of 28-year-old YouTube celebrity Jake Paul. The announcement of his fight against Anthony Joshua next month has generated a flood of foreboding prognoses, and fair enough. Stepping into the ring with a two-time world heavyweight champion when a) you’re not even a heavyweight, b) your record consists almost entirely of novices and geriatrics and c) you still fight like a marmoset trapped in an empty crisp packet: on some level, we all know how this might go.

Pontiff backs statement by US bishops condemning raids and mass deportations under Trump administration

Pope Leo has reiterated his disapproval of Donald Trump’s immigration policies, saying foreigners in the US are being treated in an “extremely disrespectful way”.

Leo, the first US pontiff in the history of the Catholic church, made the remarks in response to questions about a statement adopted last week during a special assembly of US bishops that criticised the Trump administration’s mass deportations and lamented the fear and anxiety caused by immigration raids.

A bitter race to claim economic and political power has divided the country and the human cost can no longer be ignored

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Almost everywhere I go, I am asked about Sudan. The questions are partly from concern for family and my birth country, and partly from a genuine desire to understand how the conflict there has turned into something so intense and seemingly unstoppable. This week, I break down what is happening in the country, and why it has escalated to catastrophic proportions.

***

• 40-year-old plays in first NBA game in seven months

• James finishes with 11 points and 12 assists

LeBron James certainly didn’t look like he had been away from the court for nearly seven months when he began his unprecedented 23rd NBA season on Tuesday night – even if his burning lungs told him otherwise.

After reaching another landmark in what is now officially the longest career in league history, James was not at all surprised to return from his lengthy injury absence by fitting in seamlessly with the surging Los Angeles Lakers in yet another victory.

PM raises Guardian reporting of allegations from more than a dozen school contemporaries of Farage

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has called on Nigel Farage to urgently explain himself after the Reform leader wholesale denied numerous detailed allegations of racist behaviour during his teenage years.

Responding to the Reform MP Lee Anderson at prime minister’s questions, Starmer raised the Guardian’s reporting of allegations from well over a dozen school contemporaries of Farage.

I once even thought I had seen my late grandmother. Can science explain my overfamiliarity with strange faces?

When I was in my mid-20s, I spotted my grandma through the window of a coffee shop. I was dumbstruck – she had passed away the year before. I stared for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn’t be her.

I’d had similar experiences all my life. Every now and then, I “recognized” someone I didn’t know. Sometimes I could quickly pinpoint who the stranger reminded me of – like my grandma. Other times, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn’t place.

Wojciech Has’s slice of 1960s surrealism is set in 18th-century Spain, as an officer careens through farcical encounters and erotic episodes in a wild ride that could be a series of Monty Python sketches

This epic picaresque comedy from 1965 is a head-spinning period-costume adventure of 18th-century Spain from Polish film-maker Wojciech Has. It is a surrealist film whose surrealism resides not merely in the bizarre parched landscape of the Sierra Morena mountain range with its bleached skulls, hanged bandits, crows and mysterious inns in which seductive encounters are to be had, but also simply in the bewildering juxtaposition of individual tales and anecdotes, stories which grow out of each other. The surrealist effect (and the comedy) is in the jolt from one micro-narrative to the other, and the realisation that the overall story is thwarted and undermined.

The premise is that in the Spanish town of Saragossa during the Napoleonic wars, one officer tries to arrest another, who is apparently reading an old book – but is then distracted by the fact that this book is about his own grandfather, the nobleman Alfonse Van Worden. (Later we discover that the passages about this grandfather have been added by hand, in pen-and-ink, hence Saragossa Manuscript.) Then we flash back to the this preening aristocrat-soldier himself, played by prominent Polish actor Zbigniew Cybulski.