Economy weathered a fraught geopolitical landscape to reach 5% target but structural challenges at home ‘are not going away’, say experts
Chinese authorities can say they hit their growth goals last year, but Donald Trump’s ongoing trade aggression, a slow-motion housing market collapse and unhappy consumers remain major challenges for the world’s second-largest economy.
Data released on Monday showed the Chinese economy grew by 5% in 2025, steady on the year before and hitting the official target of “around” that pace.
This shocking moment is the outcome of a political, institutional and media environment that is not far off Britain’s
There is not much that can still shock about Donald Trump’s second administration. But the killing of Renee Good earlier this month by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, as well as the regular, often violent confrontations that ICE stages on US streets, show so much that is unravelling in plain sight. The rule of law, the freedom to protest, and even the right to walk or drive in the streets safely without being assaulted by the state, seems to exist no longer in the towns and cities where ICE has made its presence felt. The most disturbing aspect of all this is how quickly it has happened. But for a government agency such as ICE to become the powerful paramilitary force that it is, several factors need to be in play first. Only one of them is Donald Trump.
ICE may look as if it came out of nowhere, but the sort of authoritarianism that results in these crackdowns never does. It takes shape slowly, in plain sight, in a way that is clearly traceable over time. First, there needs to be a merging of immigration and security concerns, both institutionally and in the political culture. Established in the wake of 9/11, ICE was part of a government restructuring under President George W Bush. It was granted a large budget, wide investigative powers and a partnership with the FBI’s joint terrorism taskforce. The work of enforcing immigration law became inextricably linked to the business of keeping Americans safe after the largest attack on US soil. That then extended into a wider emphasis, under Barack Obama, beyond those who posed national security threats, and on to immigrants apprehended at the border, gang members and non-citizens convicted of felonies or misdemeanours.
Aid groups say rise of far-right rhetoric in politics has fed into intimidation, vandalism and hate graffiti around migrant camps
Not far from a camp in Dunkirk where hundreds of asylum seekers sleep, hoping to cross the Channel to the UK, are some chilling pieces of graffiti. There is a hangman’s noose with a figure dangling next to the word “migrant” and, close by, another daubing: a Jewish Star of David painted in black surrounded by red swastikas.
Utopia 56, a French group supporting migrants in northern France, posted the image on X on Christmas Day with the comment: “This is what comes from normalising the extreme right’s rhetoric, a visible, unapologetic, unabashed hatred.”
A hearty seafood stew of haddock, leeks and barley, and an almost indecently rich and comforting cheesy rarebit
For me, the best winter cooking is about comfort, warmth and connection – food that feels familiar, yet still tells a story. I’ve always been drawn to dishes that celebrate simple, honest ingredients and local tradition, and these two recipes are inspired by that spirit, and by a childhood spent doing lots of fishing in Wales. The seafood cawl is a lighter, coastal take on the Welsh classic, while the rarebit is rich and nostalgic. Both are designed to be cooked slowly and shared generously, and an ode to home kitchens, good produce and quiet moments around the table.
After lengthy delays, the $836m market has opened its doors with dozens of new venders seeking to lure visitors with everything from bánh mì to artisan cheese
When the new Sydney Fish Market flung open its doors for the first time on Monday morning, one regular clientele was notably absent.
There were no seagulls. And, by extension, no poo.
Two people detained in Kermanshah, including 16-year-old, tell group they were subjected to sexual abuse during arrest
A 16-year-old was among protesters sexually assaulted in custody by the security forces in Iran during the nationwide uprising that has left thousands dead, according to a human rights group.
Two people, one of them a child, detained in the city of Kermanshah in western Iran told the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) that they were subjected to sexual abuse by riot police during their arrest.
His blunt, brash scepticism has made the podcaster and writer something of a cult figure. But as concern over large language models builds, he’s no longer the outsider he once was
If some time in an entirely possible future they come to make a movie about “how the AI bubble burst”, Ed Zitron will doubtless be a main character. He’s the perfect outsider figure: the eccentric loner who saw all this coming and screamed from the sidelines that the sky was falling, but nobody would listen. Just as Christian Bale portrayed Michael Burry, the investor who predicted the 2008 financial crash, in The Big Short, you can well imagine Robert Pattinson fighting Paul Mescal, say, to portray Zitron, the animated, colourfully obnoxious but doggedly detail-oriented Brit, who’s become one of big tech’s noisiest critics.
This is not to say the AI bubble will burst, necessarily, but against a tidal wave of AI boosterism, Zitron’s blunt, brash scepticism has made him something of a cult figure. His tech newsletter, Where’s Your Ed At, now has more than 80,000 subscribers; his weekly podcast, Better Offline, is well within the Top 20 on the tech charts; he’s a regular dissenting voice in the media; and his subreddit has become a safe space for AI sceptics, including those within the tech industry itself – one user describes him as “a lighthouse in a storm of insane hypercapitalist bullshit”.
I was a bit nervous when I first joined a pop choir that included a weekly pub singalong. I needn’t have worried
When I walked into Auberge, a pub near Waterloo station in London, on Thursday 21 October 2021, I didn’t know a soul. By kicking-out time, I had 50 new friends. I’ve been back almost every Thursday since.
She started out performing in her living room, charging £1.50 a ticket. Now, having blazed through Love Island and silenced her Strictly haters, the Welsh sensation is really hitting the big time
At the end of last year’s Strictly Come Dancing semi-final, pro dancer Nikita Kuzmin made a tearful appeal to camera, “I speak to the audience at home: guys, just please, please be kind!” His celebrity partner, Love Island winner, Dancing on Ice contestant and musical theatre actor Amber Davies, had been getting a lot of flak online. “You have had so much hate, every single day,” said Kuzmin.
Isn’t it crazy that we have to remind people to be nice to other humans who are just doing their job, I say to Davies, when we meet in a London hotel bar. “I genuinely think it’s getting worse,” says Davies, who has been in the public eye since 2017. “With TikTok, when people jump on a bandwagon, they go for it,” she adds. “But I feel like the nasty comments I was getting [on Strictly] weren’t actually coming from the younger audience, they came from the older audience.”
American third seed beats Kamilla Rakhimova 6-2, 6-3
‘I just want to win the tournament,’ says 21-year-old
Coco Gauff made a solid start to the Australian Open as she secured a relatively straightforward victory on Rod Laver Arena, moving past Kamilla Rakhimova of Uzbekistan 6-2, 6-3 to reach the second round at Melbourne Park.
Gauff, the third seed, put together a solid opening performance as she attempts to follow up her second grand slam triumph at Roland Garros last year by winning her first title in Melbourne. Despite her usual serving difficulties at the beginning and end of the match, Gauff completely outmatched her Uzbek challenger from the baseline with her supreme defensive skills and court sense, smartly choosing her moments to step inside the baseline and dictate.
Matthew Stafford and the Los Angeles Rams survived an incredible throw by Caleb Williams that forced overtime, beating the Chicago Bears 20-17 on Sunday night to advance to the NFC championship game.
Harrison Mevis kicked a 42-yard field goal in OT after Kam Curl intercepted a deep pass by Williams on the Bears’ first possession of the extra period. Stafford completed a 16-yard pass to Puka Nacua to get the Rams into field-goal range and set up the 245lbs Mevis, known as the “Thiccer Kicker,” for the game-ending kick. He was mobbed by teammates while a crowd that was rocking earlier watched in near silence.
A crime scene has been established on a popular tourist island off the Queensland coast after a 19-year-old woman died on Monday morning.
The national broadcaster reported the young woman found on the beach north of the Maheno shipwreck on K’gari (formerly known as Fraser Island) was a Canadian citizen.
Government’s truce with Syrian Democratic Forces follows advance on Kurdish-held areas amid struggle to control entire country
The Syrian government on Sunday announced a ceasefire with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), taking almost full control of the country and dismantling the Kurdish-led forces that controlled the north-east for over a decade.
The announcement comes as tensions between government forces and the SDF boiled over earlier this month, eventually resulting in a major push by government forces towards the east. The SDF appeared to have largely retreated after initial clashes on a tense frontline area in eastern Aleppo province.
De Minaur and MacDonald have met twice before with the Australian winning on both occasions, but the most recent of those was indoors in 2022, so it’s unlikely to be playing on the minds of either combatant.
The segment, reported by Sharyn Alfonsi, was supposed to air on 21 December but was pulled by editor in chief Bari Weiss
Nearly a month after CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss ignited controversy by shelving a 60 Minutes segment about Venezuelan prisoners, telling staffers that it needed more reporting, the piece finally aired on Sunday night.
Weiss had originally instructed 60 Minutes to hold the segment about the Cecot prison in El Salvador, which had already been scheduled, in part because it lacked “the administration’s argument”.
A return to nuclear power is at the heart of Japan’s energy policy but, in the wake of the 2011 disaster, residents’ fears about tsunamis, earthquakes and evacuation plans remain
The activity around the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant is reaching its peak: workers remove earth to expand the width of a main road, while lorries arrive at its heavily guarded entrance. A long perimeter fence is lined with countless coils of razor wire, and in a layby, a police patrol car monitors visitors to the beach – one of the few locations with a clear view of the reactors, framed by a snowy Mount Yoneyama.
When all seven of its reactors are working, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa generates 8.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power millions of households. Occupying 4.2 sq km of land in Niigata prefecture on the Japan Sea coast, it is the biggest nuclear power plant in the world.
Kyiv’s forces say 30 Russian strikes recorded across 15 locations while hundreds of thousands left without electricity in occupied Zaporizhzhia. What we know on day 1,426
Moscow kept up its hammering of Ukraine’s energy grid in attacks that killed at least two people overnight to Sunday, according to Ukrainian officials. At least six people were wounded in the Dnipropetrovsk region, the emergency service said. Russia also targeted energy infrastructure in Odesa region, it said. A fire broke out and was promptly extinguished. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Telegram that repairing the country’s energy system remained challenging “but we are doing everything we can to restore everything as quickly as possible”. The Ukrainian president said two people were killed in overnight attacks across the country that struck Sumy, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Khmelnytskyi and Odesa and included more than 200 drones. The military said 30 strikes had been recorded across 15 locations. One person was killed in the second-largest city of Kharkiv, said mayor Ihor Terekhov.
Ukrainian drone strikes damaged energy networks in Russia-occupied parts of southern Ukraine, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power, according to Kremlin-installed authorities there. More than 200,000 households in the occupied part of southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region had no electricity on Sunday, the Kremlin-installed local governor said. Nearly 400 settlements have had their supply cut because of damage to power networks from Ukrainian drone strikes, Yevgeny Balitsky said on Telegram.
Ukrainian crews have started repair works on the backup power line connecting the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to the power grid, under a ceasefire brokered by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based UN organisation said on X post on Sunday. The fate of the plant – occupied by Russia and the largest in Europe – is a central issue in ongoing US-brokered peace talks.
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez has said a US invasion of Greenland would make Russian president Vladimir Putin “the happiest man on Earth” in a newspaper interview. Sanchez said any military action by the US against Denmark’s Arctic territory would damage Nato and legitimise the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. “If we focus on Greenland, I have to say that a US invasion of that territory would make Vladimir Putin the happiest man in the world. Why? Because it would legitimise his attempted invasion of Ukraine,” Sanchez said in an interview in La Vanguardia newspaper published on Sunday. “If the United States were to use force, it would be the death knell for Nato. Putin would be doubly happy.“
Ukraine’s top negotiator said talks with US officials on ending the war with Russia would continue at the World Economic Forum opening this week in the Swiss resort of Davos. Rustem Umerov, writing on Telegram, said on Sunday that two days of talks in Florida with a US team including envoy Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner had focused on security guarantees and a postwar recovery plan for Ukraine.
With Rob Minkoff, Allers directed 1994’s The Lion King, which remains the highest-grossing traditionally animated film of all time
Roger Allers, the Disney film-maker who co-directed The Lion King and worked on films including Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid, has died aged 76.
Allers’ colleague at the Walt Disney Company, Dave Bossert announced his death on social media on Sunday morning, remembering him as “an extraordinarily gifted artist and film-maker, a true pillar of the Disney Animation renaissance”.
Moderate socialist Antonio Jose Seguro came out on top in the first round, followed by Andre Ventura of the far-right Chega party
Moderate socialist Antonio Jose Seguro came out on top in the first round of Portugal’s presidential election on Sunday, followed by the far-right leader Andre Ventura, and the two will face off in a runoff on 8 February.
In the five decades since Portugal threw off its fascist dictatorship, a presidential election has only once before required a runoff – in 1986 – highlighting how fragmented the political landscape has become with the rise of the far right and voter disenchantment with mainstream parties.
US army issues prepare-to-deploy orders amid tension over ICE killing, though it is unclear if units will be sent
The Pentagon has ordered about 1,500 active-duty soldiers in Alaska to prepare for a possible deployment to Minnesota, the site of large protests against the government’s deportation drive, two US officials told Reuters on Sunday.
The US army placed the units on prepare-to-deploy orders in case violence in the midwestern state escalates, the officials said, though it is not clear whether any of them will be sent.
Gunners top list for first time with £22.2m revenue
NWSL clubs not included on Deloitte’s yearly ranking
Some of the richest clubs in women’s football saw their revenues increase by 35% last year, with Arsenal generating the largest revenue in Europe for the first time since Deloitte began charting the top earners in the women’s game.
The north London side had revenues of €25.6m (£22.2m), narrowly overtaking Chelsea, thanks largely to their €7m of matchday revenue, which was nearly twice as much as anyone else, boosted by their move to play all of their home league fixtures at the Emirates Stadium. So far this season they have attracted an average home attendance of just over 35,000 fans.
Governments opting for oligarchy while brutally repressing protests over austerity and lack of jobs, charity report says
The world saw a record number of billionaires created last year, with a collective wealth of $18.3tn (£13.7tn), while global efforts stalled in the fight against poverty and hunger.
Oxfam’s annual survey of global inequality has revealed that the number of billionaires surpassed 3,000 for the first time during 2025. Since 2020, their collective wealth grew by 81%, or $8.2tn, which the charity claims would be enough to eradicate global poverty 26 times over.
A 12-year-old boy is in for the “fight of his life” after being attacked by a large shark in Sydney Harbour on Sunday afternoon, with police warning against people entering the water at nearby swimming spots.
In a separate incident on Monday, a shark attacked an 11-year-old boy at Dee Why, in the city’s north. The shark left multiple bite marks on his board but the boy was unharmed.
Broncos and Patriots will play for place in Super Bowl
Drake Maye threw three touchdown passes, Marcus Jones returned one of CJ Stroud’s four interceptions for a score and the New England Patriots defeated the Houston Texans 28-16 on Sunday to advance to the AFC championship game for the first time in seven years, where they will play the Denver Broncos.
In Mike Vrabel’s first season as head coach, the Patriots will make their 16th conference championship game appearance and first since their run to their sixth Super Bowl title under Bill Belichick in the 2018 season. New England have won their last nine divisional round games.
Maye finished 16 of 27 for 179 yards, but had an interception and fumbled four times, losing two in cold conditions as snow and rain fell throughout the game. One of Maye’s fumbles set up Houston’s first touchdown.
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