YouGov survey finds many say payments are too low and oppose reforms such as raising retirement age or cuts

Most Europeans believe their country’s state pension system will soon become unaffordable – but they also think the current scheme is not generous enough, and do not support options for overhauling it such as raising the retirement age.

As populations age and fertility rates decline, Europe’s “pay as you go” state pension systems, cornerstones of the welfare state that have always relied on people in work paying the retirees’ pensions, are coming under increasingly heavy pressure.

PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5; Embark Studios
The breakout hit, which has players coming together (or turning on each other) to battle intimidating robots in an apocalyptic future, is worth the hype

Arc Raiders is an extraction shooter from Embark Studios – so, a game where you deploy into a map full of other players and do as much shooting and looting as you can before making an escape. This is my first real go at the genre, and it’s excellent. It has smooth, only occasionally cumbersome combat, sound design that scratches the brain just right and robotic enemies that genuinely terrify. And it satisfies my constant need to sift through my inventory and rifle through every drawer.

But I have to keep my head on a swivel: Arc Raider’s player v player element means I can get jumped for my precious cargo by a malicious rival at any moment. And also, the knowledge that this game was made with the help of generative AI voice acting makes me slightly ashamed of how much I enjoy it. I play every game sheepishly looking over my shoulder (and my character’s) in case someone in-game takes my sought-after blueprint, or someone in real life kicks down my door to call me a hypocrite.

The latest in our series of writers highlighting their most rewatched comfort films is an ode to the charming 80s-set comedy

While casting his knockout quasi-biopic The Social Network, film-maker David Fincher must’ve really dug how eventual Mark Zuckerberg portrayer Jesse Eisenberg handled being dumped on screen. A year before the award-lassoing Facebook drama, which led to an Oscar nomination for Eisenberg, the actor agonised through the dreamy foreground of Adventureland as reluctant carny James Brennan.

The parallels between Fincher’s and Greg Mottola’s movies begin and end with their opening unceremonious separations, yet an admittedly romantic logic does allow me to soak in the notion that the great directorial mind behind such zingers as Zodiac and Gone Girl also found solace in this cinematic time machine.

Young men swapping Nike Tech fleeces for quarter-zips are all over TikTok, as well as staging IRL meetups worldwide. What’s behind the growing movement centring a once unremarkable garment?

As I’m wearing a quarter-zip jumper and sipping on an iced matcha, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s my last day of term before the school holidays. The giveaway is it’s a Saturday in London’s Soho, and I’m surrounded by 20 or so young men between the ages of 13 and 21 who are all here for London’s first ever “quarter-zip meetup”.

Organised, rather bizarrely, by sibling rappers OKay the Duo, the meetup is the latest manifestation of a growing tongue-in-cheek trend for quarter-zips and matcha that has taken over TikTok globally. Previous meetups have taken place in Houston and Rotterdam.

Spring-like weather experienced by many Americans to end, while heavy snow in Japan brings deadly conditions

A week of extremes in the US as Arctic air plunges southwards across many states, sweeping away record-breaking warmth from last weekend. With low pressure in the west drawing up warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico, much of the south and midwest basked in spring-like weather this weekend with temperatures widely an extraordinary 15-20C above normal for late December.

This week, however, most people will ditch their summer clothes for hats and scarves as a ridge pressure builds across the west, allowing for a polar airmass to dive southward, bringing freezing temperatures and the risk of snow.

Former House speaker on ABC News also said congressional Republicans have ceded almost all their power to Trump

Democrats will retake the US House’s majority in the 2026 midterm elections, the chamber’s former speaker Nancy Pelosi has confidently predicted – and she hopes her party colleagues then seize back the congressional power that Republicans have all but ceded to Donald Trump.

Asked Sunday on ABC News’s This Week if she had any doubts over whether Democratic New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries would hold the speaker’s gavel after the elections midway through Trump’s second presidency, Pelosi said: “None.”

Cliche-ridden, excessively sentimental and lacking in historical rigour, this film is a grave act of nationalist self-soothing

Nothing says happy Hanukah like a Holocaust-themed movie, especially if it ends on a feelgood note of survival and reunion after a run of tragic deaths and lashings of suffering. But this Israeli-Belarusian co-production is so excessively sentimental, cliche-riddled and arguably hypocritical considering its provenance, it’s not easy to forbear.

It opens in contemporary Tel Aviv with an elderly man named Ilya receiving news he can barely believe is true: someone dear to him from his childhood is alive. This prompts Ilya to tell his grandsons for the first time about what happened to him during the second world war. Desaturated cinematography then unfolds his story in flashback, showing young Ilya (Andrey Davidyuk) and his little brother Sasha as preteen Jewish boys living in Minsk with their parents, just as the war starts. Dad goes off to the front and is never seen again; the brothers and their mother are soon rounded up by the Nazis, represented by one German actor (Jean-Marc Birkholz) who keeps cropping up throughout to ruin life for Ilya. It’s as if the production didn’t have enough budget to afford a second German-speaking actor or (charitably) because the film-makers are making some kind of symbolic point about the banality – or in this case indistinguishability – of evil. I suspect the former is the case.

A deep dive into the creation of eight buildings from the 1700s to the 1900s tells some very human stories

History used to be about wars and dates, but to the architecture writer and TV presenter Dan Cruickshank, it’s more about floors and grates. In his new book, he takes a keen-eyed tour of eight English houses, from Northumberland to Sussex, dating from the early 1700s to exactly 100 years ago, and ranging from an outlandish gothic pile to one of the first council flats. In Cruickshank’s pages, classical influences from Rome and Greece give way to a revival of medieval English gothic and the emergence of modernism.

He is particularly interested in who commissioned and built his chosen dwellings, and how they got the job done. It’s a new spin on the recent fashion for historians to explore the homes of commoners, as opposed to royalty and aristocrats, in order to tell the life stories of their occupants. This probably began with the late Gillian Tindall, who wrote a highly original book about the various tenants of an old house by the Thames next to the rebuilt Globe theatre. That was followed by several series of A House Through Time, fronted by Traitors star David Olosuga.

Candidates will have to sit assessments in person unless there are exceptional circumstances, says ACCA

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The world’s largest accounting body is to stop students being allowed to take exams remotely to crack down on a rise in cheating on tests that underpin professional qualifications.

The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), which has almost 260,000 members, has said that from March it will stop allowing students to take online exams in all but exceptional circumstances.

Campaigner recently released from prison makes statement after PM’s support is questioned by Tory MPs

Alaa Abd el-Fattah, the British-Egyptian human rights campaigner, has apologised unreservedly for what he accepted were shocking and hurtful tweets that he wrote more than 10 years ago in what he described as heated online battles.

He said he was shaken by the criticism that has rained down on him since the tweets were highlighted by shadow ministers challenging Keir Starmer’s support for him since he was released by the Egyptian government to travel to the UK after his release from more than 10 years in prison.

These unfairly maligned animals were nuggets for our ancestors and served for the UK during the second world war

Is there something I would figuratively die on a hill for? Yes, there is – and as it happens, I’m sitting on a literal hill right now, feeding them. Pigeons. Why pigeons? Because it’s about time they get the respect they deserve.

I like pigeons. Because they’re like me, working class. You can tell pigeons are working class because every pigeon looks knackered. It’s about this point in the conversation that people politely make their excuses and slowly back away (literally) while avoiding eye contact. No doubt, reading this, you are doing the same (figuratively).

Toussaint Douglass is a comedian from Lewisham, south London. His show Accessible Pigeon Material will be showing at Soho Theatre, 26-31 January 2026

The Guardian sport photographer selects his favourite images he has taken this year and recalls the stories behind them

This is a selection of some of my favourite pictures taken at events I’ve covered this year, quite a few of which haven’t been published before. Several have been chosen for their news value, others purely for their aesthetic value, while some are here just because there’s a nice story behind them.

Some extraordinary golf was often overshadowed by the Donald, colourful fans, crazy MCs and tempers flaring

I was out by the practice green late afternoon on the Monday of the Ryder Cup, and so was Bryson DeChambeau. He was on his own, signing autographs for the handful of people on the other side of the railings, and there was this one woman leaning over towards him, a bottle blonde, late middle-aged, in a tight white dress. She was only a couple of feet away from him but she was screaming in his ear like she was trying to reach someone across the far side of the golf course. “We love you Bryson! Bryson! We love you! We love you for everything you’ve done for the Donald! We love you for everything you’ve done for the Donald!”

It was a long, strange week, and when I think back on it now the golf is entirely overwhelmed by technicolour memories of the weird scenes around the grounds of Bethpage Black and in the surrounding town of Farmingdale. I wish I could say that the things I remember best are that approach shot Scottie Scheffler hit from 180 yards at the 10th, or the 40ft putt Rory McIlroy made on the 6th, or Jon Rahm’s chip-in from the rough at the 8th. But they’re not.

Like her forebears Fiona Apple and Giant Drag, Izzy Hagerup puts a distinctly twisty take on indie-rock, and is unafraid of dark emotional truths

From Chicago
Recommended if you like Wednesday, Fiona Apple, Giant Drag
Up next European/UK tour kicks off in May

A word that Prewn, AKA Izzy Hagerup, often uses to describe her music is “dissociation” – the disconnected emotional state embodied by many of the Chicago-born musician’s songs. It’s not an impression anyone would be left with from listening to her bitter, potent take on indie-rock. Hagerup’s guitar lines snake as they thrash; her balladry is grimy and expansive, steered by febrile vocals that recall mid-period Fiona Apple and the drone of the cello she played as a kid. Unexpected moments lurk, such as the shadowy slip into trip-hop on recent single Dirty Dog.

Stress releases hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, which can suppress your immune system – but chronic concerns are more of an issue than short-term worries

‘Stress has a well-established effect on your immune health,” says Daniel M Davis, head of life sciences at Imperial College London. “But stress is a very broad phenomenon. You can feel stressed watching a horror movie, or you can experience long-term stress, like going through a divorce.”

Short-term stress can temporarily affect your immune system. “The number of immune cells in the blood changes,” says Davis. “But it returns to normal within about an hour, so it’s unlikely to have any major impact.”

Hinata Goto reportedly fell as he was trying to get off the 30-metre-long walkway

A five-year-old boy has died after becoming trapped in a moving travelator at a ski resort in northern Japan, local media have said.

The victim, Hinata Goto, died on Sunday after his right arm became trapped in the walkway’s winding mechanism during a family skiing trip to Otaru, a city on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido.

Prevention and and keeping on top of the small problems will save you money in the long term

Looking after electrical goods will save you money in the long term. “Regular, small tasks keep appliances working efficiently and help you avoid early replacements,” says Paula Higgins, the founder of the HomeOwners Alliance.

Coastal erosion may threaten the area around Southwold, but a new ‘movable’ cabin makes a great base for exploring its windswept beaches, remote marshes and welcoming inns

The crumbling cliff edge is just metres away. An automatic blind, which I can operate without getting out of bed, rises to reveal an ocean view: the dramatic storm-surging North Sea with great black-backed gulls circling nearby and a distant ship on the horizon. A watery gold sunrise lights the clouds and turbulent grey water.

I’m the first person to sleep in the new Kraken lodge at Still Southwold, a former farm in Easton Bavents on the Suffolk coast. It’s a stylish wooden cabin, one of a scattering of holiday lets in an area prone to aggressive coastal erosion. The owner, Anne Jones, describes the challenges of living on a coast that is rapidly receding in the face of climate-exacerbated storms: the waves have eroded more than 40 hectares (100 acres), and the family business “is no longer a viable farm”. Instead, it is home to low-carbon cottages and cabins, “designed to be movable when the land they stand on is lost to the sea”. The latest projects include a sea-view sauna and a ‘dune hut’ on the beach for reflexology treatments “with the sea and waves as the backdrop”.

From an acclaimed short-story writer, this epic of power and class across generations in Pakistan is brutal, funny and brilliantly told

Imagine a shattering portrayal of Pakistani life through a chain of interlocking novellas, and you’ll be somewhere close to understanding the breadth and impact of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s first novel. Reminiscent of Neel Mukherjee’s dazzling circular depiction of Indian inequalities, A State of Freedom, it’s a keenly anticipated follow-up to the acclaimed short-story collection with which he made his debut in 2009, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders – also portraying overlapping worlds of Pakistani class and culture.

We begin in the squalor and bustle of a Rawalpindi bazaar in the 1950s, where the heartbreaking figure of a small child, abandoned to his fate and clutching a pair of plastic shoes, is scooped under the protection of a tea stall owner. He proceeds to raise the boy as his own son, having only daughters, but Yazid is also adopted by the stall’s garrulous regulars, who teach him both to read and to pay keen attention to the currents of class, wealth and power which flow past him every day.

Jérémie Battaglia’s captivating documentary follows two north African raseteurs battling bulls and systemic racism in southern France

In southern France, the ancient and controversial tradition of Camargue bullfighting remains to this day. In contrast to more lethal forms of the sport, participants – or raseteurs – win points by snatching various ribbons attached to the bulls, each of which comes with a cash prize up to thousands of euros. Following a group of athletes of north African descent, Jérémie Battaglia’s documentary paints a captivating portrait of multicultural France.

For Jawad Bakloul and Belkacem Benhammou, the two young men at the centre of the film, the hardships multiply. Because of their ethnic background, the pair encounter a world of contradictions when they step into an arena. Not only do they face mortal danger, they also face racial abuse from the older, largely white spectators, despite upholding a piece of traditional French culture.

The Guardian’s fans’ network on 2025-26 at the halfway stage: best games, worst setbacks, and their January window wish lists

Story so far It would be pretty churlish to be anything other than super-chuffed, with those displays over Bayern Munich and our neighbours among the highlights. But, as we know, there are no prizes for being top at Christmas. Our success so far has largely been due to our defensive resilience; it’s the most talented squad we’ve had in many a moon but we’ve only shone going forward in fits and spurts. Find that spark on a consistent basis and we really will be firing.

Bernard Azulay onlinegooner.com; @GoonerN5

Model turned actor never lost the poise from her dancing days – but she also made gingham and leopard print her own

• French screen legend dies aged 91

• Brigitte Bardot: a life in pictures

• Obituary: star who shot to fame in the 1950s

And God Created Woman, the title of the 1956 film that made Brigitte Bardot a global star, is the phrase that captures the magic of her. Bardot had an allure that was dazzling in its glamour, yet so natural that to gaze on it felt like a gift from the heavens.

In style, as in life, timing is everything – and Bardot became the poster girl for that sweet spot of postwar France in which the storied heritage of Gallic culture was electrified by the Bohemian spirit of Paris in the 1950s and 60s.

With his new film rejected by official censors, the award-winning film-maker says he is being punished for his outspoken views

In Hong Kong, where dissent is now characterised by silence, few dare openly criticise the government or the Chinese Communist party (CCP) that controls it. Film-maker Kiwi Chow is one of the few.

“The Chinese Communist party’s practice is to try and destroy history and truth,” the 46-year-old director says from his home in the region. “It’s ridiculous that I can still live in Hong Kong without being in jail.”

Rural depopulation compounding challenges of climate emergency and changing technologies in drawing young people to sector

The huge concrete vats that have held countless litres of verdejo white wine in the 90 years since the Cuatro Rayas cooperative winery was founded are dwarfed by the stainless steels tanks that sit opposite and serve as reminders that, even in an enterprise as ancient as winemaking, times change.

Outside, a chilly but welcome rain falls on the surrounding vines, autumn-brown after another furnace-hot summer in the northern Spanish province of Valladolid. But changing technologies and the vagaries of the climate emergency are not the only challenges facing Spain’s €22.4bn (£20bn) wine industry.