Defense secretary has been insisting that an admiral gave the order for the second strike on alleged drug boat back in September

• Trump administration is ‘selling out’ admiral to shield Hegseth over boat strikes, officials say

• Pete Hegseth told US soldiers in Iraq to ignore legal advice on rules of engagement

Joseph Gedeon is a politics breaking news reporter based in Washington

The FBI director, Kash Patel, is “in over his head” and leading a “chronically under-performing” agency paralyzed by fear and plummeting morale, according to a scathing 115-page report compiled by a national alliance of retired and active-duty FBI special agents and analysts.

The award-winning drama series has received a 4K restoration that has seen jumbled up episodes and a vomit machine goof

A recent 4K restoration of Mad Men has brought new fans to HBO Max – as well as technical headaches.

Bemused and bewildered fans of the groundbreaking television series, which ran from 2007 until 2015 on AMC, have spotted numerous errors after the supposedly sleek restoration began streaming on HBO Max, including several episodes out of order and one particularly glaring post-production goof.

• Williams back in ITIA pool for first time since 2022

• Move required before any potential competitive return

• Could be eligible to play again as early as mid-2026

Serena Williams has taken the procedural move required of any retired player contemplating a competitive comeback, after the 23-time grand slam singles champion re-entered the International Tennis Integrity Agency’s (ITIA) registered testing pool for the first time since 2022.

Williams, 44, has not played an official match since her run to the third round of the US Open more than three years ago. Although she described her departure at the time as “evolving away” from the sport rather than a hard retirement, she filed the paperwork with the ITIA that September that exempted her from the sport’s stringent, year-round whereabouts requirements. To return to competition, however, retired athletes must make themselves available for out-of-competition testing for six months before they are allowed to enter an event.

The wholesale giant claims the White House misused emergency authority and warns importers could lose refunds even if duties are ruled unlawful

Costco is suing the Trump administration over its tariffs, arguing that the White House has exceeded its executive authority in instituting tariffs and that it should be entitled to a refund if the tariffs are found unconstitutional.

In a lawsuit filed to the Court of International Trade last Friday, the retail giant argued the Trump administration has misused the federal law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), it cited to impose the tariffs.

Chief executive tells staff it is ‘critical time’ for chatbot as it faces intense competition from Google’s new Gemini 3

Sam Altman has declared a “code red” at OpenAI to improve ChatGPT as the chatbot faces intense competition from rivals.

The chief executive of the San Francisco-based startup told staff in an internal memo: “We are at a critical time for ChatGPT,” according to a report by tech news site the Information.

The era of plump, cuddly pets may soon be over, as overweight animals are being prescribed a version of Ozempic. What will this do to their love for food?

Name: Ozempets.

Age: Depending on the species, anywhere from 0 to 18 years or so.

Experts still debate whether ‘love addiction’ appropriately describes destructive romantic fixation

Elizabeth Gilbert was using people like drugs: a point she emphasizes throughout her memoir All the Way to the River, released in September.

In the book, Gilbert describes falling in love with her friend Rayya Elias. Elias’s terminal cancer diagnosis compelled Gilbert to reveal her feelings, despite being married at the time. She admits to enabling Elias, a self-described “ex-junkie”, to access hard drugs and alcohol during her final months as a warped act of care.

Release of convicted cocaine trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández is latest US interference in election and comes despite Trump’s apparent ‘war on drugs’

• Analysis: Trump’s pardon of Honduras’s ex-president shows counter-drug effort is ‘based on lies and hypocrisy’

A former president of Honduras who was convicted of drug trafficking has walked free from a US prison after receiving a pardon from Donald Trump, as the country’s presidential election remained on a knife edge with the US-backed candidate leading by 515 votes.

Juan Orlando Hernández, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison for allegedly creating “a cocaine superhighway to the United States”, was released from a West Virginia prison after Trump’s intervention, Hernández’s wife confirmed on Tuesday.

Girls’ adventure charity says it made decision after seeking legal advice following supreme court ruling on gender

Trans girls will no longer be able to join Girlguiding, the organisation has announced, saying it has made the decision after seeking legal advice as a result of the supreme court ruling on gender earlier this year.

Girlguiding on Tuesday said: “Trans girls and young women, and others not recorded female at birth, will no longer be able to join Girlguiding as new young members”.

She’s far from the only celebrity to have declared her intention to live outside the US. As with many others though, it looks like a reverse ferret could be in the works

I’m not some sort of secret Reform voter, OK? As a Brit (albeit a Brit abroad), I’ve got no problem with rich immigrants coming to the UK and taking all our mansions. I just think they really ought to integrate and not bring their funny foreign ideas with them.

Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi, I’m talking to you. The California couple arrived in the UK last year, just before Donald Trump won the election. As soon as the votes were in, they declared they weren’t going back, and would stay on the saner side of the Atlantic. I’m not sure how the immigration logistics worked, but it seems “one in, one out” schemes don’t apply to people coming in on big jets, only small boats. The pair bought a fancy pad in the Cotswolds and DeGeneres buttered up the locals during a public appearance in July by declaring “Everything here is just better.”

Belgian police raid EU foreign service HQ and College of Europe and arrest Federica Mogherini and two others

Belgian police have arrested three people including the EU’s former top diplomat Federica Mogherini and raided the headquarters of the EU foreign service and the elite College of Europe as part of an investigation into suspected fraud.

The three were detained “as part of a probe into suspected fraud related to EU-funded training for junior diplomats”, the European public prosecutor’s office said in a statement, without naming individuals.

Late-night hosts discussed the president alleging he knows nothing about a recently revealed MRI scan from October

Late-night hosts tore into Donald Trump for his use of an ableist slur and unconvincing attempts to assuage concerns about his cognitive abilities.

• Pair verbally and physically abused as they left team bus

• Nice to await police report before deciding on response

The Nice players Terem Moffi and Jérémie Boga have been placed on sick leave after the team were confronted by supporters upon their return from a 3-1 defeat at Lorient.

Moffi was given a week’s leave and Boga five days, both effective from Monday, after an estimated 400 fans gathered outside the club’s training centre on Sunday night. The pair were verbally and physically abused as they left the team bus after the travelling party was swamped by ultras unhappy at a sixth consecutive loss in all competitions. The club’s sporting director, Florian Maurice, was also among those targeted.

The 79-year-old president’s social media blitz included conspiracies, attacks on political foes and self-praise

From apparently nodding off in the Oval Office to a work day that often only begins in the afternoon, questions have swirled in recent weeks about the energy levels of 79-year-old Donald Trump, the oldest-ever US president.

Yet on social media, the commander in chief is showing no signs of fatigue. In a furious spree on Monday night on his preferred social media platform, Truth Social, Trump posted 160 times in less than four hours, a maelstrom of messaging surpassing previous prolific bouts of ranting.

The Irish politician was targeted in 2022, in the final weeks of her run for office. She has never found out who made the malicious deepfake, but knew immediately she had to try to stop this happening to other women

When Cara Hunter, the Stormont politician, looks back on the moment she found out she had been deepfaked, she says it is “like watching a horror movie”. The setting is her grandmother’s rural home in the west of Tyrone on her 90th birthday, April 2022. “Everyone was there,” she says. “I was sitting with all my closest family members and family friends when I got a notification through Facebook Messenger.” It was from a stranger. “Is that you in the video … the one going round on WhatsApp?” he asked.

Hunter made videos all the time, especially then, less than three weeks before elections for the Northern Ireland assembly. She was defending her East Londonderry seat, campaigning, canvassing, debating. Yet, as a woman, this message from a man she didn’t know was enough to put her on alert. “I replied that I wasn’t sure which video he was talking about,” Hunter says. “So he asked, did I want to see it?” Then he sent it over.

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The US president has halted decisions on many asylum claims, but the scope, legality and real-world effects of the pause remain unclear

• Asylum seekers across US in limbo over Trump’s policy reversals: ‘devastating’

Donald Trump has ordered a “pause” on asylum claims after last week’s shooting of two national guard members in Washington. The suspect in the shooting, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is a 29-year-old Afghani national who assisted US forces during the two-decade war there and was paroled into the United States in 2021. US citizenship and immigration services awarded him asylum earlier this year.

It is not clear how long the president’s asylum pause will last. Trump told reporters Sunday that the directive “has no time limit, but it could be a long time”.

Laying a table well is one of the best ways to make guests feel relaxed and cosy. Queen of tablescaping Laura Jackson’s advice? Forget the stiff old rules and have fun with it

A feast is not just about food. Just to sit at a table surrounded by the faces of your people: nothing beats it. A feast is about togetherness, whether there are two people at the table, or 16. The primal joy of good food taps into something even more fundamental than hunger; if food is a love language, a feast is a big hug.

Is it sacrilege to say that being a host matters more than being a cook? Not to disparage the skill of the chef. Quite the opposite, it takes skill to make really good gravy, concentration to remember to take the cake out of the oven before it burns, and years of experience to time a roast to come together at the right moment. It takes no skill to fold a napkin and light a candle, yet with a beautifully laid and bounteously laden table, the night feels special before dinner is served, which takes the pressure off.

Nintendo Switch/Switch 2 (version tested); Retro Studios/Nintendo
The bounty hunter – Nintendo’s most badass and most neglected hero – returns in an atmospheric throwback sci-fi adventure that’s entirely untroubled by the conventions of modern game design

In a frozen laboratory full of cryogenically suspended experimental life forms, metal boots disturb the frost. A lone bounty hunter in a familiar orange exosuit points her blaster ahead. Making my way towards the facility’s power generator, scanning doors and hunting for secret entrances, broken hatches and hidden keys, I suspect that I know exactly what’s going to happen when this place begins to thaw; every clank and creak sounds sounds as if it could be a long-dormant beast busting out of one of those pods. And yet Samus Aran delves deeper, because she has never been afraid of anything.

This section of Prime 4 is classic Metroid: atmospheric, eerie, lonely, dangerous and cryptic. Samus, Nintendo’s coolest hero, is impeccably awesome, equipped here with new psychic powers that accent her suit with pulsing purple light. (I have taken many screenshots of her looking identically badass all over the game’s planet.) She is controlled with dual sticks, or – much better, much more intuitive – by pointing one of the Switch 2’s remotes at the screen to aim. Or even by using it as a mouse on a table or your knee, though this made my wrist hurt after a while. She transforms into a rolling ball, moves statues into place with her mind, and rides a futuristic shape-shifting motorcycle across lava and sand between this distant planet’s abandoned facilities, unlocking its dead civilisation’s lost knowledge.

Netflix’s series feels like the point of no return for the rapper and mogul. It’s so thorough in its harrowing detail that it will surely block any chance he ever had of a return to stardom

If its subject gets his way, the new documentary series Sean Combs: The Reckoning might not be available on Netflix for long. On Monday, lawyers on behalf of Combs sent a cease and desist letter to the streamer, demanding that the series be withdrawn based on the inclusion of footage that they claim violates copyright, and involves discussions of “legal strategy that were not intended for public viewing”.

After watching the series, you can see why Combs might be rattled. This is a man whose fall from grace last year was sudden and comprehensive, and yet Sean Combs: The Reckoning feels like the moment of no return for him. It does such a thorough job of laying out and backing up so many horrific allegations that his way back to stardom is surely blocked for ever.

Janet’s wishlist, which ran in Leeds Mercury, and letter from Hampshire girl in 1898 unearthed in newspaper archives

The toys on the Christmas wishlist may have evolved in more than 140 years but children, it seems, do not change. That, at least, is the suggestion of a newly uncovered letter to Father Christmas dating from 1883, believed to be one of the earliest known such messages in the UK.

The letter, addressed to “DeAR SAnTA CLAus”, was written by a six-year-old girl called Janet and preserves her idiosyncratic spelling and capitalisation. “PLeAs BRIng a Doll to Me with a cRADEL, AND a TRuMPtet to JiMMie, AND SoMe OTHer THing to MA AND PA,” wrote Janet, demonstrating both a touching concern for her family members and a canny nose for publicity.

Apple among big tech companies reportedly refusing to install Sanchar Saathi cybersecurity app on their devices

A political outcry has erupted in India after the government mandated large technology companies to install a state-owned app on smartphones that has led to surveillance fears among opposition MPs and activists.

Manufacturers including Apple, Samsung and Xiomi have 90 days to comply with the order to preload the government’s Sanchar Saathi, or Communication Partner, on every phone in India.

The rising star has made her debut film, Dreamers, a semi-autobiographical love story set in an immigration detention centre. She talks about fleeing persecution in Nigeria – and what she learned from French new wave

Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor had a little wobble when she stepped on to the stage after the screening of her debut feature, Dreamers, at the London film festival. The Nigerian-British director’s film is a love story set in an immigration detention centre. It had already premiered in Berlin earlier this year. But showing her semi-autobiographical film to a home crowd in London felt exposing. “I suddenly had this feeling: Oh my God, everyone can see me. Everyone knows everything about me.” She laughs.

Gharoro-Akpojotor has built a reputation as a rising star producer. Her company Joi Productions makes films telling black, female and gay stories. (“All of the above, sometimes individually.”) Her credits include Rapman’s Blue Story and Aml Ameen’s romcom Boxing Day, and she is currently working on Ashley Walters’ directing debut Animol.

‘Psychosexual pop thriller’ comes from The Green Knight’s David Lowery and will feature new music from Charli xcx

Anne Hathaway plays a pop star and Michaela Coel her estranged fashion designer in the first trailer for the highly anticipated drama Mother Mary.

The film comes from David Lowery, whose previous films range from The Green Knight to A Ghost Story to Pete’s Dragon. His last film was the Disney+ original Peter Pan & Wendy starring Jude Law.