A heavily damaged Sloviansk, one of two Ukrainian-held cities that form Kyiv’s last main defensive belt in the Donetsk region in the east, and which could be included in a proposed demilitarized zone, in September.
For the 70th year in a row, people of all ages will be able to get updates on Santa's journey around the world from the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado
The White House sent CBS a statement that it did not use for the "60 Minutes" CECOT segment that was delayed by network editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, in which it called on the show to amplify stories of Angel Parents.
Worst rail disruption is on CrossCountry Trains through Birmingham, while easyJet passengers from Tenerife are scrambling to return to Manchester after flight cancellation
While the new restrictions on firearms have broad support, new police powers to crack down on some protests were criticized as limits on civil liberties.
It has been a year dominated by Donald Trump. It has not yet even been 12 full months since his return to the White House in January but already the changes he has wrought – both in the US and around the world – seemed scarcely conceivable in 2024. Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, tells Annie Kelly what it has looked like from the editor’s chair: from the deployment of the national guard on American streets, to the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, to the erosion of the rules that once governed peace and war.
In the UK, she describes a Labour government failing to tell its story and missing chance after chance to tackle the rise of Reform and the far right. ‘Politics is about timing,’ she says of the government’s notable silence over the summer, ‘and I think a lot of those opportunities were missed.’ It has not been a year without hope, from the unexpected success of leftwing figures such as Zohran Mamdani and Zack Polanski, to the Guardian’s decisive victories in court defending its reporting, in a case described as a landmark ruling for #MeToo journalism. Support the Guardian today: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod
This is our last episode of 2025. Thank you to everyone who has listened and watched this year. We will return with new episodes on 5 January 2026.
Inspired by Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden and the quivering soundscapes of early Bon Iver, Tomorrow Held is the beautiful second album by fiddler Owen Spafford and guitarist Louis Campbell, their first on Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records. Mingling traditional tunes with influences from minimalism, post-rock and jazz, they shift moods exquisitely: from the reflectiveness of 26, a track in which drumbeats echo in the distance like heartbeats, to the trip-hop-like grooves of All Your Tiny Bones and the feverish panic of the full-throttle final track, Four.
Shroud-chewers, lip-smackers and suckers populate this fascinating study of ‘the unquiet dead’ across the centuries
The word “vampire” first appears in English in sensational accounts of a revenant panic in Serbia in the early 18th century. One case in 1725 concerned a recently deceased peasant farmer, Peter Blagojević, who rose from the grave, visited his wife to demand his shoes, and then murdered nine people in the night. When his body was disinterred, his mouth was found full of fresh blood. The villagers staked the corpse and then burned it. In 1745, the clergyman John Swinton published an anonymous pamphlet, The Travels of Three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburgh, in which it is written: “These Vampyres are supposed to be the Bodies of deceased Persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out of the Graves, in the Night-time, suck the Blood of many of the Living, and thereby destroy them.” And so a modern myth was born.
But it is not so modern, or exclusively European, as this extraordinary survey shows. Instead, the author, a historian and archeologist, argues that belief in the unquiet dead is found in many cultures and periods, where it can lay dormant for centuries before erupting in an “epidemic”, as in Serbia. Where there is no written source, John Blair makes persuasive use of archeological finds in which bodies are found to have been decapitated or nailed down. In 16th-century Poland, a buried woman “had a sickle placed upright across her throat and a padlock on the big toe of her left foot”. Someone, our author infers reasonably, wanted to keep these people in their coffins.
Instead of seeing etiquette as a set of categorical rules, we should recognise that poor form can actually have good consequences
Many people are out there labouring under the impression that lateness is always terribly rude. I am here to tell you this is totally wrong. There are situations when, yes, it is rude. There are situations when it basically doesn’t matter. But there are also situations when being late is actually the height of good manners and decorum.
If you are invited to dinner, especially by a person who you can sense is an inexperienced cook or host, you should endeavour to be late. By at least 10 minutes I would say. But, honestly, if your host is a 25-year-old who has sent you a message saying, “I’m going to try making this :)” and then attached a picture of an elaborate recipe with two separate kinds of molasses, then I would say half an hour is probably best.
Rachel Connolly is the author of the novel Lazy City
‘Explosive device’ was triggered when police approached a suspicious person, say officials
Two traffic police officers and a third person have been killed in a car explosion in Moscow, Russia’s Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, said early on Wednesday.
The committee said in a statement “an explosive device was triggered” when the officers approached a “suspicious person” near their police vehicle on Yeletskaya Street in the south of the capital.
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