Sergei Udaltsov, Putin critic affiliated with the Communist party, convicted of justifying terrorism
A court in Russia on Thursday convicted a pro-war activist and critic of Vladimir Putin of justifying terrorism and sentenced him to six years in prison.
Sergei Udaltsov, the leader of the Left Front movement that opposes Putin and is affiliated with the Communist party, was arrested last year.
Sima Samar has spent a lifetime working for the ideals of a country that no longer exists, but even in exile she dreams of rebuilding for a second time
The peace of the graveyard has descended upon Afghanistan.
“Afghanistan might seem safe now, there are not a lot of explosions, but it is a graveyard kind of security. The most peaceful place is the grave: there nobody protests,” says Dr Sima Samar.
As the working year draws to a close, many of us only have one hope for the season, and that’s a decent night’s sleep. While not every family visit or post-Christmas getaway is going to be a trip to Rancho Relaxo, a few things can help us catch holiday kip. Pre-departure apps can be useful, so can pillow mists and thermoregulation, but when it comes to maximising rest on the road, some say less is more.
When the president targeted me and my TV show, millions said no. So don’t give up on us – and always remember, we’re not all like him
I have no idea if you know who I am, but I was asked to deliver this year’s alternative Christmas message (which I’ve heard is a big deal) so I hope you do, but if not I host what you call a chatshow (we call it a talkshow) in what you call the colonies, I think? I honestly have no idea what’s going on over there.
I do know what’s going on over here though, and I can tell you that, from a fascism perspective, this has been a really great year. Tyranny is booming over here.
Over the holiday period, the Guardian leader column is looking ahead at the themes of 2026. Today we look at the impact of devolution on growing volatility of party political allegiance
Next year will be pivotal in British politics, and 7 May will be the point around which things pivot. Elections to local councils, the Scottish parliament and the Welsh Senedd will give millions of voters across the UK a chance to express party preferences. Their verdicts could imperil Labour and Conservative leaders. In Wales, Labour might be sent into opposition for the first time since devolution. Plaid Cymru and Reform UK are set to make substantial gains. At Holyrood, the Scottish National party (SNP) is on course for a majority. That would be an extraordinary defiance of political gravity for a party weighed down by nearly two decades of incumbency.
In England, both Labour and the Tories risk losing scores of councillors as their vote shares are gobbled up by the Liberal Democrats, Reform UK and the Greens. Those results will be taken as evidence that Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch are failing as leaders. But it would be a mistake to filter the results only through that lens. The fragmentation of national allegiances began much longer ago.
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We can share images and sounds, so why not smells? Dr Kate McLean-MacKenzie hopes her new atlas will make scents
Christmas may be associated with the aromas of oranges and mince pies but our towns and cities also boast special scents during the rest of the year. Now, one researcher is publishing an atlas attempting to capture these quirky “smellscapes”.
Dr Kate McLean-MacKenzie, a designer and researcher at the University of Kent, said she first became intrigued by the sense of smell 15 years ago.
Imran Ahmed, an anti-disinformation advocate, claims he is being targeted over his work scrutinising social media companies
A British anti-disinformation campaigner close to Keir Starmer’s chief of staff has launched a legal challenge against the Trump administration after being told he could face deportation from the US in a row over freedom of speech.
Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), has filed a complaint against senior Trump allies including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the attorney general, Pam Bondi, in an attempt to prevent what he says would be an unconstitutional arrest and removal.
Are her recent candid remarks about Trump an attempt to distance herself from an increasingly unpopular president?
She was now one of the family. When Donald Trump addressed supporters in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, in early December, he asked: “Susie Trump – do you know Susie Trump? Sometimes referred to as Susie Wiles.”
The US president was referring to his chief of staff, who he said had persuaded him to return to the campaign trail ahead of the 2026 congressional midterm elections. But a week later, Wiles appeared at risk of becoming the family outcast.
Some parts of LA saw more than 11in of rain, with flooding, road closures and debris flows reported across the region
A strong rain and wind storm, carried by an atmospheric river from the Pacific, has been blamed for a third death in southern California as flooding, road closures and debris flows are reported across the region.
A flood watch was also extended through Thursday for almost all of the area, as more than 11in of rainfall was measured in some parts Los Angeles county as of Wednesday night and evacuation warnings were issued for mountain communities in San Bernardino county.
Monarch urges people to draw strength from community diversity after a year marked by division and violence
King Charles has called for reconciliation after a year of deepening division, saying in his Christmas address that people must find strength in the diversity of their communities to ensure right defeats wrong.
The monarch cited the spirit of the second world war generation, which he said came together to take on the challenge that faced them; displaying qualities he said have shaped both the UK and the Commonwealth.
This year was a pivotal one, in which the issue of restorative justice began to frame the UK’s post-imperial relationship with the global south
A little while ago, I was interviewed for a forthcoming book about reparations by a black British comedian and his co-writer. I approached it with modest expectations. It is a serious subject for me as a Caribbean man, and I wondered whether the complexity might be flattened or trivialised in the process.
I got to read the book this week. In The Big Payback, Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder take a complex, controversial and deeply contested subject and do something both rare and necessary: they break it down into its constituent parts and explain – debunking and demystifying along the way – why so many of the stock objections to reparations are intellectually incoherent, historically illiterate or politically evasive.
Low-cost tech and joined-up funding have reduced illegal logging, mining and poaching in the Darién Gap – it’s a success story that could stop deforestation worldwide
There are no roads through the Darién Gap. This vast impenetrable forest spans the width of the land bridge between South and Central America, but there is almost no way through it: hundreds have lost their lives trying to cross it on foot.
Its size and hostility have shielded it from development for millennia, protecting hundreds of species – from harpy eagles and giant anteaters to jaguars and red-crested tamarins – in one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. But it has also made it incredibly difficult to protect. Looking after 575,000 hectares (1,420,856 acres) of beach, mangrove and rainforest with just 20 rangers often felt impossible, says Segundo Sugasti, the director of Darién national park. Like tropical forests all over the world, it has been steadily shrinking, with at least 15% lost to logging, mining and cattle ranching in two decades.
The wife of William Shakespeare takes centre stage in a rich, sensitive examination of parental grief, sensitively narrated by Jessie Buckley
The jury is still out on the merits of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, which arrives in cinemas next month, but there is no arguing with the quality of the source material. Maggie O’Farrell’s lyrical and immersive novel, which won the Women’s prize in 2020, imagines the relationship between William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes Hathaway, and their grief over the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet, from the plague in 1596. The book opens with the young Hamnet realising his twin sister Judith is unwell and searching for an adult to attend to her, while unaware that he is the one who is fatally ill.
Shakespeare – who is never named and instead referred to as “the husband” or “the father” – is depicted not as a literary superstar but a flawed man who is rarely home. The focus is on Hathaway, a free-spirited woman with deep connections to the landscape. The narrative shifts between her childhood, the early years of her marriage and the aftermath of Hamnet’s death, during which Shakespeare writes one of his greatest plays, Hamlet (records state that the names Hamlet and Hamnet were interchangeable in those days).
It was the second-largest lottery windfall in US history, with a lump-sum cash payment option of $834.9m
A Powerball player in Arkansas won a $1.817bn jackpot in Wednesday’s Christmas Eve drawing, ending the lottery game’s three-month stretch without a top-prize winner.
Final ticket sales pushed the jackpot higher than previously expected, making it the second-largest in US history and the largest Powerball prize of 2025, according to www.powerball.com. The jackpot had a lump sum cash payment option of $834.9m.
Marina Lacerda urges him to answer questions as Virginia Giuffre’s lawyer says anyone who accepted former royal’s denials ‘should be ashamed’
One of the victims of the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has called for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to answer questions in the US, while a lawyer for the former royal’s accuser said those who had previously believed his denials “should be ashamed of themselves”.
Speaking to the Guardian after the release of some of the Epstein files, the tranche of documents related to the disgraced financier, Marina Lacerda, an Epstein survivor, said Mountbatten-Windsor should be “brought to justice”.
I grew up listening to the Mamas and the Papas’ hits but had never heard their albums before this year. I had no idea anything as creepy as Mansions lurked within their sunny oeuvre. Its sound is ominous, its mood one of stoned paranoia, its subject rich hippies sequestered in the titular luxury homes, haunted by the sensation that the flower-power dream is going wrong.
Revelation of Instagram spurs retired Catholic devotees in Abruzzo to gain millions of views with upbeat videos
For years, the mostly closed-off lives of the nuns living in a retirement home in Raiano, a mountain village in Italy’s Abruzzo region, followed much the same daily rhythm.
They woke early, prayed, went to the chapel, had lunch, and perhaps whiled away the afternoon reading.
Winger was described by Clough as ‘Picasso of our game’
Scored in Scotland’s 1981 win over England at Wembley
John Robertson, the Nottingham Forest and Scotland legend, has died at the age of 72. Robertson was a hugely important part of the great Forest team that under Brian Clough rose from the second tier of English football to win multiple major honours, most famously back-to-back European Cups.
Robertson assisted the decisive goal in the first European Cup triumph in 1979 and scored the decisive goal in the second, contributions that mark him out as one of the most remarkable players in British football history. He earned 28 Scotland caps, notably scoring the winning goal in a Home Championship victory over England at Wembley in May 1981. Clough described him as “the Picasso of our game”.
Exclusive: Scientists find a way to forecast hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which affects millions worldwide
Scientists are developing a simple blood test to predict who is most at risk from the world’s most common inherited heart condition.
Millions of people worldwide have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a disease of the heart muscle where the wall of the heart becomes thickened. It is caused by a change in one or more genes and mostly passed on through families.
Religious groups using banned drugs are increasingly testing the limits of faith and law – and winning
The Church of Gaia in Spokane, Washington, has all the makings of a traditional place of worship: regular gatherings, communal songs and member donations – except they also serve ayahuasca, a psychedelic substance that can induce nausea and, at times, projectile vomiting.
“This is a purely spiritual practice,” said Connor Mize, the ceremonial leader of the Church of Gaia. “It’s not a thing you do just for fun.”
The rules-based global order, its institutions and value system face a crisis of legitimacy and credibility as the US turns away
‘The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci once wrote. “And the new world struggles to be born.” In such interregnums, the Italian Marxist philosopher suggested, “every act, even the smallest, may acquire decisive weight”.
In 2025, western leaders appeared convinced they – and we – were living through one such transitional period, as the world of international relations established after the second world war crashed to a halt.
On that brilliant night at Ally Pally 21 years ago, Laura and I decided to go to Detroit on holiday. Since then there have been countless adventures: road trips, dive bars, rock camps …
Kicking-out time, January 2004, and Laura and I are sitting on the kerb waiting for a bus outside Alexandra Palace in north London. Not that we’re in a hurry to be anywhere else. We’re having the best time on our kerb, cheeks flushed from hard liquor and the exhilaration of the White Stripes show we’ve just seen. We’re busy communing with a fellow nocturnal creature, a woodlouse. It is one of those rare moments in my 20s when just about everything feels right.
Laura and I had quietly become office allies over a few years, a bond initially forming around our mutual shy diligence in the face of not fully fitting in. We would conspiratorially skip downstairs to the canteen together most lunchtimes and temper any work worries by chatting shit, laughing hysterically and plotting small acts of rebellion. (Like the time we childishly made a “FUCK CHESS” sign and left it on the office chess club’s shelf, which for some reason felt necessary and hilarious. If you’re reading this, chess club, we’re very sorry.)
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