While the standards of good taste are very much of its time, this crime thriller is a ride of fender mangling car chases, over-the-top punch ups and nutso action

Nonstop gonzo mayhem is on show in this pulp shocker from 1980, beginning with an amazingly reckless, fender-mangling, passerby-endangering car chase which more or less takes up the first 20 minutes. It’s a gritty New York sleazesploitation crime thriller with some gobsmackingly over-the-top punch-ups and shootouts; some of the attitudes to ethnicity and sexual politics can only be described as of their time. Those who prefer 21st-century standards of good taste had better look away now.

A racist paedophile (Cliff Gorman) has kidnapped the 15-year-old daughter of divorced ex-cop Sean Boyd, played by James Brolin. This sweaty creep is demanding a million-dollar ransom, but he’s got the wrong girl. He thinks that his prisoner – whom he dresses up in a diaphanous blue gown belonging to his dead mom, and at one point kisses tenderly on the lips – is the daughter of a property magnate that he blames for moving so-called undesirables into his Bronx apartment building, with a view to forcing out existing tenants so he can knock the whole thing down for a new development. (We glimpse a New York Daily News headline: “Carter Tours The S Bronx Slums”.)

There’s more to that salty umami aroma than kickstarting a dirty martini. Use it to give your focaccia a perfect flavourful crust

When I taste-tested olives for the food filter column a few months ago, it reminded me that the brine is an ingredient in its own right. This intensely savoury liquid adds umami depth to whatever it touches, and, beyond seasoning soups and stews, it can also be used to make salamoia, the aromatic brine that’s traditionally used to top focaccia and create that perfect salty crust.

Starmer defends Wes Streeting at PMQs but dodges question on his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has condemned as “completely unacceptable” any briefings against cabinet ministers from inside Downing Street as he tried desperately to close a rift at the top of government.

Questioned by Kemi Badenoch at prime minister’s questions, Starmer defended Wes Streeting, the health secretary, who was the apparent target of a pre-emptive No 10 push against a feared imminent leadership challenge against the prime minister.

Kemi Badenoch probes Starmer over ‘toxic culture’ at Downing Street as PM denies authorising briefings against potential challengers

The No 10 briefing row is not the only story around this morning. Amy Sedghi is writing a live blog about the ongoing turmoil at the BBC and she has details of Donald Trump saying he has an “obligation” to sue the BBC.

In a related development, Reform UK has pulled out of a BBC documentary about the party amid a row over the broadcaster’s editing of the Trump speech. Robyn Vintner has the story.

• Kane has £57m summer release clause in Bayern contract

• Lewandowski’s contract with Barcelona expires in June

Barcelona have made Harry Kane their first-choice target to replace Robert Lewandowski. The Spanish champions regard the 32-year-old England captain as the ideal younger replacement for the 37-year-old Lewandowski, whose contract expires in June, and may well be prepared to trigger the clause in Kane’s contract with Bayern Munich that would allow him to leave for £57m in the summer.

Kane has proven a huge success at Bayern since joining them from Tottenham for £100m in August 2023, scoring an astonishing 108 goals in 113 appearances and in September became the fastest player this century to reach 100 goals for a club playing in one of Europe’s top five leagues. He also ended his trophy drought in May after playing a key role in Bayern reclaiming the Bundesliga title.

DFDS says film was broadcast mistakenly to passengers who had been watching F1 race on France-UK service

A ferry company has apologised after children were left “screaming” when a pornographic film was played on one of its ships from France to Sussex.

DFDS said it was “very sorry” over the incident, which happened onboard the ferry from Dieppe in France to Newhaven.

Working with jaguars in Brazil’s Pantanal was a huge source of joy. But the wildfires are getting worse. This is Abbie’s story

Location Pantanal, Brazil

Disaster Wildfires, a number of years

Abbie Martin splits her time between captaining a boat in the Virgin Islands and doing research in Brazil’s Pantanal, a region that includes the world’s largest tropical wetland and where she founded the Jaguar Identification Project. Fires in the Pantanal have reached new extremes, killing at least 17 million vertebrate animals and burning 27% of the vegetation cover in 2020. Climate breakdown made the Pantanal drier between 2001-21, increasing the occurrence of above-average fires in the region.

As Asia’s allocation has now doubled, many nations look to foreign-born talent to push them towards qualification

When the United Arab Emirates line up against Iraq on Thursday for the fifth and final round of Asian qualification for next year’s World Cup, it is likely that over half of the home starting XI in Abu Dhabi will be foreign-born. The UAE are, however, merely another participant in a naturalisation arms race in the continent that has been boosted by the expansion of the World Cup from 32 teams to 48.

Asia’s allocation has doubled from four automatic spots in Qatar to eight in North America, opening up the tournament to a new array of contenders desperate to play on the greatest stage of all. Japan, South Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Australia have historically dominated World Cup qualifying, with North Korea the most recent outlier in 2010. Those six are the only teams from the Asian Football Confederation to make more than one appearance at the tournament.

From Zak Crawley hitting Pat Cummins for four to Rory Burns’ duck, it is seen as a tone-setting prophecy

You always remember the first. Senses heightened, clammy palms, not quite knowing where to look or what to focus on. It is OK to be nervous … but is it normal to be this nervous? Castanet heart and goosebumped skin as the moment gets nearer. Just get this one out of the way, don’t put too much pressure on it. Calm down. This is supposed to be fun.

Your mind wanders to Zak Crawley lacing Pat Cummins across the Edgbaston turf like a pebble skimmed across a glacier. You really can’t help who pops in at these moments. But who is this now? Oh it’s Rory Burns toppling over, Brisbane rug pulled from underneath him, leg stump knocked back and bails sent upwards like a pair of forlorn eyebrows. What to do now, just lie back and think of English turmoil?

David Osit’s documentary takes a disturbing look at the televised shaming served up by the hit show To Catch a Predator

It’s too soon to know for sure, but this may end up being ranked as one of the best nonfiction films of the year. At least let’s hope lots of people get to see this, even if it’s a mistake because they meant to buy a ticket for Predator: Badlands. Instead of an alien hunter with gnarly teeth, this offers a profoundly troubling meditation on our collective thirst for revenge – or at least the kind of bizarre performance art version of revenge as served up by reality TV show To Catch a Predator, a US series that ran from 2004 to 2007 and which featured weekly footage of paedophiles and would-be paedophiles being duped, shamed and arrested.

Predators’ director David Osit, at first just an offscreen voice but eventually a fully seen (in every sense) presence, explains that he used to watch To Catch a Predator avidly as a young man. Every episode was roughly the same: a man is observed arriving at a suburban house, expecting to have sex there with a teenaged girl or boy who is in fact a hired actor who has lured the target over. Then journalist Chris Hansen would step out from behind a doorway to confront the target with transcripts of interactions he had been having with the decoy. The target would then usually start crying and pleading for mercy;and then, in a final theatrical act of cruelty, he’d be told he was free to go only to be arrested seconds later by waiting law enforcement officers working with the show.

Lina Khan outraged corporates and conservatives as head of the Federal Trade Commission. Expect more of the same now she’s with the mayor-elect’s transition team

A relatively unknown thirtysomething parachuted on to the national stage and into high political office. Energising to some of the Democratic base but lacking support from the party establishment. Not Zohran Mamdani but Lina Khan, who Joe Biden appointed to chair the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2021 when she was just 32. Khan, who left her role at the FTC when Trump returned to the White House, is now one of five women appointed to the mayor-elect of New York’s transition team.

Khan is the most exciting pick for a few reasons. She entered the FTC with an ambitious mandate to transform the government agency, broaden its focus to increase scrutiny of corporate mergers and do more to protect consumers – and got results. She brought down the price of inhalers (routinely being sold for hundreds of dollars) by tackling price gouging by pharmaceutical companies. She blocked a huge supermarket merger and returned more than $60m to Amazon drivers in unpaid tips. All of her achievements were delivered in four years, while navigating a bureaucracy that was sometimes hostile to her leadership.

A hit Netflix documentary about Germany’s favourite rapper demonstrates how popular the aesthetics of migrant life are – just as politicians debate how to remove it from inner cities

If you want to understand the state of Germany in these last weeks of 2025, grasping the meaning of two entries in the German dictionary are essential: stadtbild and haftbefehl.

The first term technically means “cityscape”. But since chancellor Friedrich Merz gave a speech in the state of Brandenburg on 14 October, it has taken on a new political meaning. “We have come far with migration,” he said, “but of course we still have this problem in our stadtbild.”

Having worked alongside everyone from Laurence Olivier to a French circus, the 89-year-old is still composing, learning church bells, and using AI to resurrect a lost epic

Mike Westbrook is reflecting on his 89-year life from his cottage by the sea in Devon. Sitting with him in his cosy, book-lined sitting room under a signed picture of Duke Ellington, and next to his Broadwood grand piano, the experience is calm and peaceful.

His version of jazz is anything but. For more than six decades, Westbrook has been composing vast, cinematic works. He was the first jazz artist to play at the BBC Proms, created theatre alongside Laurence Olivier, and in the 1970s merged his entire ensemble with the avant-rock band Henry Cow to form the groundbreaking Orckestra. The result is music full of brass fanfares, unusual time signatures, poetry, free improvisation, and genre-bending jazz that invites the listener into a continental circus full of elephants, acrobats, and clowns.

US president sets Friday deadline for corporation to respond to billion-dollar legal threat

• Trump to sue BBC – latest updates

Donald Trump has said he feels he has “an obligation” to sue the BBC over its editing of one of his speeches, as a deadline looms for the corporation to respond to his billion-dollar legal threat.

The US president accused the broadcaster of having “defrauded the public” with an edition of Panorama last year that spliced together two parts of a speech he made on 6 January 2021 and has given it until Friday to respond.

In this week’s newsletter: Critics have yet come up with an alternative that would truly bring all countries together to work to solve the climate crisis

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World leaders – or at least about 50 of them – flew away from preliminary Cop meetings in the Amazonian city of Belém last week, where they met to discuss the climate crisis, the ravages committed on the planet’s biggest rainforest only too apparent beneath them, if they chose to look.

Deforestation, drought and the climate crisis are pushing the Amazon to what could become a “tipping point”, where it changes state from a rainforest to a savannah ecosystem, and from a massive absorber of carbon to releasing carbon into the atmosphere, which would have devastating consequences for the whole world.

‘It will never be forgiven’: UN climate chief warns world to act or face disaster

Typhoon Fung-Wong becomes second in a week to hit the Philippines

I wish we could ignore Bill Gates on the climate crisis. But he’s a billionaire, so we can’t | George Monbiot

Q&A: what are the main issues at Cop30 and why do they matter?

Rich countries have lost enthusiasm for tackling climate crisis, says Cop30 chief

The temperature at Cop30: Trump’s absence better than a US wrecking ball

They’ve been shown to influence regeneration and healing, but you may want to read this before splashing out

I attended a big skincare industry event in New York last autumn, at which people seemed to be discussing exosomes as though all other anti-ageing skincare products and methodology would soon be rendered redundant. I’ve read countless roundups of new exosome products since then (£430 for a serum!), and felt the inescapable buzz of a perceived major breakthrough in skincare, and so you know what I’m about to do, again. I’m going to suggest everyone calms the hell down and finds something more worthwhile to spend their money on.

Exosomes, in very basic terms, are tiny, naturally occurring parcels of material used as a communication device between skin cells. They can positively influence skin cell behaviour, such as regeneration and healing. Studies into whether extracted exosomes work in treatments for skin inflammation, hair growth and scarring are so far mostly small, pre-clinical and it must be said, very promising, albeit far from conclusive. We don’t yet know how best to extract exosomes, how stable they are, how they should be used to best effect, whether they will work topically, or what impact they may have on things like skin cancers.

Exclusive: ‘Deep-rooted injustices’ affect billions of people due to location of wells, pipelines and other infrastructure

A quarter of the world’s population lives within three miles (5km) of operational fossil fuel projects, potentially threatening the health of more than 2 billion people as well as critical ecosystems, according to first-of-its-kind research.

A damning new report by Amnesty International, shared exclusively with the Guardian, found that more than 18,300 oil, gas and coal sites are currently distributed across 170 countries worldwide, occupying a vast area of the Earth’s surface.

Human rights groups accuse Trump officials of complicity and draw comparison with scandal at Abu Ghraib prison

More than 252 Venezuelans expelled to El Salvador under Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy suffered systematic and prolonged torture and abuse, including sexual assault, during their detention, according to a report published on Wednesday.

The report, compiled jointly by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Cristosal – a group investigating violations in Central America – says conditions at El Salvador’s sprawling “terrorist continent center” (Cecot) breached the UN’s standard minimal rules for the treatment of prisoners. It cites “inhumane prison conditions, including prolonged incommunicado detention, inadequate food” and other shortcomings.

Smallville actor, released from prison two years ago, tells how she helped coerce women for cult leader Keith Raniere

The Smallville actor Allison Mack says she was once riveted by the influence she wielded through her role in the Nxivm sex cult – though it eventually sent her to federal prison, and she now realizes it was “abusive”.

“I was excited by the power that I felt having these young, beautiful women look to me and listen to me,” Mack, 43, maintains in a new podcast series titled Allison After Nxivm, which contains her first public remarks since her release from prison about two years ago. “And – yes – the sexuality of it was exciting.”

Jelly is back in all its wobbly, Instagram-friendly glory. But does it always taste as impressive as it looks? And why is it so hard to get it to set rather than slump? This could get messy …

Jelly has a dowdy reputation, but it may well be the perfect food for the Instagram age: when it works, it’s incredibly photogenic, so who cares what it tastes like?

There can be no other explanation for recent claims that savoury jellies – the most lurid and off-putting of dishes, reminiscent of the worst culinary efforts of the 1950s – are suddenly fashionable. This resurgence comes, according to the New York Times, “at a time when chefs are feeling pressure to produce viral visuals and molecular gastronomy is old hat”.

José Antonio Kast, 59, is appealing to voters with a hard-right pitch on crime and immigration

Even before José Antonio Kast popped into his high-altitude restaurant for a plate of alpaca ribs, Carlos Valdebenito Pacheco was set on voting for the ultra-conservative favourite to become the next president of Chile.

“Without a doubt – 100%,” enthused the 55-year-old waiter from Visviri, an isolated Andean outpost more than 4,000 metres above sea level on Chile’s triple border with Bolivia and Peru.

Democrats have vowed to vote against the proposal after a faction of Senators broke with party to pass a compromise

• US politics – live updates

The House on Wednesday was poised to vote on legislation that would end the longest government shutdown in US history, as Democrats voice fury that the Senate-brokered compromise fails to extend expiring healthcare subsidies.

The House speaker, Mike Johnson, has instructed lawmakers to return to Washington after keeping the chamber out of session for more than 50 days.

A study suggesting mRNA vaccines help the body fight malignant cells raises the tantalising prospect of a low-cost, low-risk treatment that could help with all cancers

I’m often asked whether we’re better prepared for the next pandemic. It’s a mixed answer, but the bright spot is scientific progress on vaccines. The Covid vaccines were produced faster than any previous effort, and are credited with saving millions of lives from 2021 onwards. The mRNA vaccines – Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna – were designed within days of the Sars-CoV-2 genome being published in January 2020, and went into safety trials over the following months before finally being approved in the UK at the end of 2020.

But could they have additional benefits? According to a recent study published in Nature, mRNA vaccines seem to trigger a powerful immune response that increases the median survival time by about 75% for certain cancer patients. These findings – which are being further developed – could indicate the power of repurposing vaccines and medicines that have already passed trials for safety and are available at reasonable cost.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

Fit Forever: Wellness for midlife and beyond. On Wednesday 28 January 2026, join Annie Kelly, Devi Sridhar, Joel Snape and Mariella Frostrup, as they discuss how to enjoy longer and healthier lives, with expert advice and practical tips. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

US president claims broadcaster has ‘defrauded the public’ and reiterates his threat of launching a $1bn legal action

Responding to UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy’s refusal to review the BBC board membership of Robbie Gibb, Liberal Democrat culture, media and sports spokesperson Anna Sabine said on Tuesday evening:

This is the wrong choice by Lisa Nandy. Robbie Gibb isn’t fit to serve on the BBC board, and the BBC charter gives the government the power to sack him.

I hope the prime minister will step in and do the right thing.