For workers sending money to support their relatives, payments are both a burden and badge of pride

From Senegal to Somalia and Egypt to South Africa, credit alert notifications from fintech apps such as Western Union or WorldRemit often set the mood for the rest of the day, week or even month.

Transfers from workers within the continent and the diaspora to their relatives are often referred to as the “black tax”, whereby one person’s salary and relative success can become the safety net for a whole extended family.

Toby, a data analyst, meets Liam, a civil servant. Both are 29

What were you hoping for?
I wanted to go in with no expectations.

I see the manure sellers as part of some lost and deeply English tradition, which is why I prefer my wife to deal with them

I am in the kitchen watching the dog and the cat fight when the tortoise suddenly appears. Or to put it another way: I watched the dog and the cat fight for a while, until it became tiresome; the next time I looked up – possibly 15 minutes later – the tortoise was also there. That’s what I mean by suddenly. In real terms, the tortoise doesn’t do anything suddenly.

“Where have you been?” I say, even though I know the answer. I haven’t seen the tortoise in six weeks, but I’m certain he’s been butted up against the left rear leg of the sofa for that whole period.

Brooklyn’s Instagram bombshell tested decades of image control, revealing how fame, PR and power collide behind the scenes

On a personal level, it’s all extremely sad. A once close family ripped apart by feuding and bitterness. A much-loved son blocking all contact with his parents and siblings.

From another perspective, however, for those who have followed the movements of David and Victoria Beckham in their 30 years in the (carefully curated) spotlight, the public falling out this week of Britain’s alternative royal family has been a car crash from which it is hard to look away.

Martin Rowson has been drawing for the Guardian since the 1980s; Ella Baron since 2022. In paint and pixels, each is tasked with capturing the chaos and absurdity of our political moment

Photographs and video by David Levene

• Gallery: cartoonists Martin Rowson and Ella Baron at work – in pictures

Martin Rowson and Ella Baron are both regular contributors to the Guardian’s daily political cartoon. Martin has been with the Guardian for decades; Ella has been contributing since 2022. This week, we challenged the pair to draw on the same subject (Trump and a world in turmoil), on the same day, to see what each – with their different styles, tools and perspectives – would come up with. Martin landed on a Shakespearean scene, with a warped “King Leer” flanked by snickering world leaders. Ella proposed him squatting in a dystopian nest, surrounded by his spoils. Below, each reflects on their process, the challenges and joys of political cartoons, and what they have learned from one another.

Soft leeks and crisped tempeh drizzled in a sticky, spicy sweet soy sauce and liberally sprinkled with salted peanuts

Tempeh is a gift to all home cooks from Indonesia. Made from fermented compressed soy beans, it’s an intelligent ingredient equivalent to meat in terms of protein, subtle and nutty in flavour and chewy in texture. Happily, it is also now widely available in most large UK supermarkets. Here, the tempeh is cooked in a typical Indonesian way – that is, fried until crisp, then coated in a sticky, spicy sweet soy sauce and liberally sprinkled with salted peanuts. In fact, the only anomaly is the leeks, making this dish mostly Indonesian but via a field in Lincolnshire.

Why do some people age better than others? Five extraordinary individuals – who scientists are studying – share their tips

Lajuana Weathers is determined to be the healthiest version of herself. She starts each day with a celery juice, is always trying to increase her step count, and meditates daily. Weathers is also 89 years old. And she has no plans to slow down. “I wake up in the morning and feel blessed that I have another chance at a day of life,” says the grandmother of six, and great‑grandmother of six more, who lives in Illinois in an independent living facility for seniors. “I look at my life as a holistic entity, and in that life is my physical, social, emotional and spiritual wellbeing. I have to take care of all of those. That’s what I like about the ageing process. All the clutter of raising children is out and I can concentrate on the wellness of me.”

Weathers is a superager. This isn’t a self-proclaimed label, but one backed up by science – she is part of the SuperAging Research Initiative at the University of Chicago. To qualify for the study, you have to be over 80 years old and have memory performance that’s at least as good as the average 50- to 60-year-old. There are about 400 superagers enrolled across North America.

There are fears that Europe is exhausted with the war, worries about Trump’s logic but some hope of a silver lining

In the Benedikt cafe in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, one wall is covered by a giant map with countries and territories cut out of lacquered wooden pieces, with Greenland at its apex.

The waiter has not been following news of the Greenland crisis and Donald Trump’s desire to annex the Danish territory. But the echoes of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin’s imperial land grab of the waiter’s own country are clear to him. “They’re crazy. The pair of them.”

Wolves killed more than 2,100 reindeer in Finland last year, and herders are blaming the Ukraine war

Juha Kujala no longer knows how many reindeer will return to his farm from the forest each December. The 54-year-old herder releases his animals into the wilderness on the 830-mile Finnish-Russian border each spring to grow fat on lichens, grass and mushrooms, just as his ancestors have done for generations.

But since 2022, grisly discoveries of reindeer skeletons on the forest floor have disrupted this ancient way of life. The culprits, according to Kujala: wolves from Russia.

DHS detain a toddler and her father on Thursday and fly them to Texas before returning child on judge’s order

Federal immigration agents detained a two-year-old girl and her father in Minneapolis on Thursday and transported them to Texas, according to court records and the family’s lawyers.

The father, identified in court filings as Elvis Joel TE, and his daughter were stopped and detained by officers around 1pm when they were returning home from the store. By the evening, a federal judge had ordered the girl be released by 9.30pm. But federal officials instead put both of them on a plane heading to a Texas detention center.

US policy document suggests South Korea take primary responsibility, as Pentagon prioritises defending US homeland

The Pentagon foresees a “more limited” role in deterring North Korea, with South Korea taking primary responsibility for the task, a Pentagon policy document released on Friday said, in a move likely to raise concern in Seoul.

South Korea hosts about 28,500 US troops in combined defence against North Korea’s military threat and Seoul has raised its defence budget by 7.5% for this year.

Family confirms boy has died almost a week after the attack, describing him as possessing the ‘most kind and generous spirit’

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A 12-year-old boy has died in hospital after being mauled by a shark in Sydney Harbour last weekend, his family has confirmed.

The boy, named as Nico Antic in an online fundraiser, had been fighting for his life after being bitten on both legs on 18 January at a harbour beach in Vaucluse, in Sydney’s east.

Sundance film festival: two teenage girls find their friendship put to the test in a witty and charmingly odd British comedy

If you know, you know that first best friendship is a world unto itself – lush, rugged and expansive, nutritive and intoxicating, vulnerable to freak changes in the weather. Its specific terrain stays invisible to outsiders; only the two within it know, and they themselves are likely to lose it in time. So goes the perilous trekking in Extra Geography, Molly Manners’ nimble and frequently funny debut film, which astutely maps the peaks and valleys of one charged friendship between two adolescent girls at an English boarding school.

Minna and Flic, played by remarkable newcomers Galaxie Clear (coming for Chase Infiniti’s name game) and Marni Duggan, begin year 10 sometime in the early 2000s, in a sunny meadow of boundless, heady entanglement. They move in playful unison, share beds and mannerisms, hold common goals (Oxbridge) and disdain (for boys, and those who covet them). Manners, a Bafta nominee for her work on the better-than-it-should-be Netflix series One Day, is particularly attuned to the energizing rhythm of platonic-ish intimacy; the first third of this brisk, 94-minute film is a mesmerizing symphony of female mind-meld, the girls slamming lockers, opening notebooks, flopping on the floor and hatching plans to a swift, synchronous beat.

Rescue efforts at Mount Maunganui site switch to recovery operation that police say could take several days

Efforts to rescue six people buried by a landslide at a New Zealand holiday park ended on Saturday, with police shifting into a recovery operation.

Police Supt Tim Anderson said human remains had been uncovered on Friday night beneath the mountains of dirt and debris that crashed into a campsite in Mount Maunganui on Thursday, adding that it could take several days to locate all of the victims due to the unstable ground.

The departure of pandas will leave legions of Japanese admirers bereft, but it is also symptomatic of a dramatic deterioration in China-Japan relations

The panda house at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo is not due to open for several hours, but visitors are already milling around its entrance, pausing to pose for photographs in front of murals of the facility’s most beloved residents. A short walk away the gift shop is doing a roaring trade in themed souvenirs – from cuddly toys and stationery to T-shirts and biscuits.

The visitors are here to say goodbye to Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei. Early next week, the twin pandas, born at the zoo in 2021 but technically on loan from China, will be flown out of Tokyo’s Narita airport to China, where they will undergo quarantine and be reunited with their sister, Xiang Xiang, at a conservation and research centre in Sichuan province.

Keys, Pegula, and Anisimova all cruise into fourth round
Defending champion overcomes cramp amid extreme heat

Pliskova 0-1 Keys (9)* The 186cm Czech intersperses a trademark ace between a series of unforced errors to hand Keys a couple of break points. She saves the first but Keys secures the early advantage with a lovely in-to-out forehand winner. The champion has started strongly, striking the ball cleanly from the baseline. Pliskova, by contrast, looks a bit flat-footed and lacking timing.

The players are out on RLA. Key’s’s neon green Nike outfit is irridescent in the bright sunshine. Pliskova is serving in orange Adidas.

Since September, military has carried out more than 30 strikes against boats that it alleges smuggle drugs

The US military said on Friday that it carried out a strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific, killing two people.

“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” the US Southern Command said in a statement.

Police reveal Julian Ingram reported to local officers as part of his bail conditions hours before the shootings

• Warning: This article contains references to Indigenous Australians who have died

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Police have widened the search for a gunman suspected of killing his pregnant former partner and two others in remote New South Wales, as police explore whether the Lake Cargelligo local may be receiving help to evade authorities.

Julian Ingram, 37, was last seen driving out of Lake Cargelligo, in the NSW central west, on Thursday. Police suspect he is armed with at least one firearm, but confirmed he has never held a firearms licence.

Journalist’s wife had contacted authorities with concerns and ‘potential information’ regarding inquiry into his death

A review of the 2005 shooting death of the journalist Hunter S Thompson has confirmed authorities’ original finding that his death was a suicide, Colorado investigators said on Friday.

The review by the Colorado bureau of investigation (CBI) was announced in September after Thompson’s wife, Anita Thompson, contacted authorities with “new concerns and potential information regarding the investigation” into Thompson’s death, the agency said in a news release.

Coroner is yet to determine the cause of death of Piper James, a 19-year-old Canadian woman found surrounded by dingoes on Monday

In the early hours of Monday morning, a young woman’s body was found being mauled by a pack of dingoes near a shipwreck on a windswept stretch of white sand beach on an island off the east coast of Australia.

The island was K’gari, formerly known as Fraser Island, in southern Queensland, home to about 150 human inhabitants and a population of dingoes genetically distinct from those on the mainland. Called wongari in the language of its Butchulla traditional owners, the lean yellow and white canids are sacred to the First People and indelibly entwined in the cultural fabric of this world-heritage listed sand island.

• Inter recover from 2-0 down to go six clear in Serie A

• In Ligue 1, PSG go above Lens, who play on Saturday

Inter were shocked to go two goals down at home to relegation-battling Pisa but fought back to earn a 6-2 win at San Siro on Friday, as they continue to set the pace at the top of Serie A.

Stefano Moreo scored twice to put Pisa 2-0 up, the first thanks to a howler from the goalkeeper Yann Sommer, but Inter were ahead by the break. Piotr Zielinski converted a penalty and Lautaro Martínez and Francesco Pio Esposito both scored with headers in six minutes just before half-time.

Gregory Bovino’s outwear choice prompts German commentators to compare it to fascist aesthetic

A greatcoat worn by the senior US border patrol official Gregory Bovino, who has spearheaded aggressive immigration operations across the country, has raised eyebrows in German media with some commentators saying it resembled a fascist aesthetic.

Bovino has been an increasingly recognisable figure during the raids in Minneapolis for the brass-buttoned, calf-length olive green coat, which is unlike the fatigues and body armor worn by many of the federal agents.

Sea lion named Confetti was rescued early January and has ‘really great chance’ of being released, marine biologist says

A rescued sea lion is recovering in Los Angeles after a marine care center discovered he had two bullets in his head.

The sea lion, named Confetti, was rescued from Ballona creek, a watershed connected to the Santa Monica bay, on 5 January, the Marine Mammal Care Center Los Angeles announced on Thursday.