Defense secretary shares anecdote in The War on Warriors and rails against ‘rules and regulations’ governing war

Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, told soldiers under his command in Iraq to ignore legal advice about when they were permitted to kill enemy combatants under their rules of engagement.

The anecdote is contained in a book Hegseth wrote last year in which he also repeatedly railed against the constraints placed on “American warfighters” by the laws of war and the Geneva conventions.

In the tropical dry forests of northern Colombia, a small team is gradually restoring the degraded habitat of the rare cotton-top tamarin

Luis Enrique Centena spent decades silencing the forest. Now, he listens. Making a whistle, the former logger points up to a flash of white and reddish fur in the canopy. Inquisitive eyes peer back – a cotton-top tamarin, one of the world’s rarest primates.

“I used to cut trees and never took the titís into account,” says Centena, calling the cotton-tops by their local name. “I ignored them. I didn’t know that they were in danger of extinction, I only knew I had to feed my family. But now we have become friends.”

Documentary about New Zealand’s former leader records a shrewd but likable premier who did without the usual politician’s defences

New Zealand’s former prime minister Jacinda Ardern emerges from this documentary portrait the way she did when she was in power from 2017 to 2023 … as a human being. More than any politician anywhere in the world in my adult lifetime, she looked like an actual member of the human race who was catapulted to office too fast to have acquired the defensive carapace of the professional politician. She was vulnerable and scrutable and likable in ways utterly alien to everyone else.

Obviously this sympathetic film has been edited in such a way as to omit most of the hard business of internal politics and to foreground this humanity, although there is one fascinating moment at the very end when her partner Clarke Gayford gently asks if she might be doing too much; with a tiny flash of temper she asks if he is telling her to “delegate”. Gayford got his Denis Thatcher closeup there. Did we see a subliminal moment of the non-niceness vital for all successful politicians?

Experts warn this likely points to ‘regression to mean’ after recent spike in mass killings rather than continued decline

A shooting last weekend at a children’s birthday party in California that left four dead was the 17th mass killing in the US this year – the lowest number recorded since 2006, according to a database that tracks them.

The mass killings – defined as incidents in which four or more people are killed in a 24-hour period, not including the killer – are tracked in a database maintained by the Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.

Anthropic’s chief scientist says AI autonomy could spark a beneficial ‘intelligence explosion’ – or be the moment humans lose control

Humanity will have to decide by 2030 whether to take the “ultimate risk” of letting artificial intelligence systems train themselves to become more powerful, one of the world’s leading AI scientists has said.

Jared Kaplan, the chief scientist and co-owner of the $180bn (£135bn) US startup Anthropic, said a choice was looming about how much autonomy the systems should be given to evolve.

Official report says forces in England and Wales yet to implement policies for investigation

A quarter of police forces in England and Wales are yet to implement “basic policies for investigating sexual offences”, an official report has found, with women still being failed despite promises of change after the murder of Sarah Everard four years ago.

The report by Dame Elish Angiolini follows an inquiry set up after Everard was murdered by a serving police officer, Wayne Couzens, in March 2021. She was abducted off a London street while walking home.

Despite the speed at which it is progressing, AI is getting far too little discussion in Congress, the media and within the general population. That has got to change

Artificial intelligence and robotics will transform the world. It will bring unimaginable changes to our economy, our politics, warfare, our emotional wellbeing, our environment, and how we educate and raise our children. Further, there is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.

Despite the extraordinary importance of this issue and the speed at which it is progressing, AI is getting far too little discussion in Congress, the media and within the general population. That has got to change. Now.

Zohran Mamdani, Ozzy Osbourne and Sinners also feature in encyclopedia’s top 20 most-read English-language pages

Wikipedia’s article on Charlie Kirk was the most read on the online encyclopedia this year, as users sought out information on the conservative activist.

People viewed the entry on Kirk nearly 45m times, many after he was shot at a university campus debate on 10 September.

Charlie Kirk, 44.9m page views

Deaths in 2025, 42.5m

Ed Gein, 31.2m

Donald Trump, 25.1m

Pope Leo XIV, 22.1m

Elon Musk, 20.2m

Zohran Mamdani, 20.1m

Sinners (2025 film), 18.2m

Ozzy Osbourne, 17.8m

Superman (2025 film), 17m

Pope Francis, 15.3m

Severance (TV series), 13.9m

United States, 13m

Thunderbolts*, 12.9m

Weapons (2025 film), 11.8m

JD Vance, 11.6m

Adolescence (TV series), 11.6m

MrBeast, 11.5m

Cristiano Ronaldo, 10.8m

The Fantastic Four: First Steps, 10.8m

Our cartoonist on the people and themes that are fuelling the buildup to next summer’s tournament in North America

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• Game against Groningen was abandoned on Sunday

• Fan will be permitted to watch behind-closed-doors game

A seriously ill Ajax fan will be the only supporter in attendance when the Eredivisie side complete their abandoned game against Groningen on Tuesday afternoon.

The fan, named Peter, is living in a hospice and had expressed the wish to attend an Ajax game for potentially the final time. They arranged for him to visit the fixture on Sunday but there was immense disappointment when it was curtailed within five minutes of kick-off owing to a huge pyrotechnic display by a section of the support.

Bloodgate, the ‘Hand of Back’ and a drop goal off ‘someone’s arse’ are among the tournament’s delightful eccentricities

On the eve of a new Champions Cup season it is worth remembering when and where it all began. The answer is 30 years ago on the shores of the Black Sea where Farul Constanta of Romania hosted France’s mighty Toulouse in the opening pool game of the old Heineken Cup on 31 October 1995.

Let’s just say they were different times. The match was played on a Tuesday and, while the crowd was recorded as 3,000, eyewitnesses were focused on the large number of security personnel with barking Alsatian dogs straining at the leash. Toulouse, boasting an array of internationals including Émile Ntamack and Thomas Castaignède, duly registered eight tries and won 54-10.

Hundreds of police, rangers and military personnel deployed to tackle virus threatening pork export industry

Spanish authorities have deployed hundreds of police officers, wildlife rangers and military personnel in an effort to contain an outbreak of highly infectious African swine fever (ASF) outside Barcelona before it becomes a major threat to the country’s €8.8bn-a-year pork export industry.

Officials believe the virus, detected in the municipality of Bellaterra, may have begun to circulate after a wild boar ate contaminated food that had been brought in from outside Spain.

Trump envoy lands in Russia as Putin hails ‘important’ capture of Pokrovsk, although claim is disputed by Kyiv

• Russia-Ukraine war – latest news updates

Vladimir Putin has claimed Russian forces have taken control of the strategic city of Pokrovsk in Ukraine, as he sought to project confidence before a key meeting on Tuesday with a US delegation to discuss a possible peace deal to end the war.

Dressed in military fatigues during a visit to a command centre on Monday evening, the Russian president hailed what he called the “important” capture of Pokrovsk – once a major logistical hub for the Ukrainian army – though Ukrainian officials later disputed the claim.

Leaving eight-year-old Lati-Yana Brown homeless and cut off from her mother should never have been sanctioned by the state

Britain’s long history with the Caribbean, from enslavement to the Windrush scandal, is marked by policies that have fractured families. The Home Office’s latest actions show little has changed. After the devastation of Hurricane Melissa, a tropical cyclone that made landfall across the Greater Antilles area in late October, eight-year-old Lati-Yana Stephanie Brown was left destitute in Jamaica. But after her UK-resident parents appealed for the Home Office to expedite her visa application, officials rejected it and Lati-Yana has been left to sleep on the floor of her elderly grandmother’s destroyed home.

But the rejection rested on factual errors, according to Lati-Yana’s mother, Kerrian Bigby. Dawn Butler, her MP, shared a letter with me raising concerns about “misrepresentations” in the decision notice, including the claim that Bigby does not have full parental responsibility for the child, which she says is false.

Nadine White is a journalist, film-maker and the UK’s first race correspondent

• Batter made more than 4,000 runs for England

• Smith spent more than 20 years at Hampshire

The former England cricketer Robin Smith has died at the age of 62, with his family and former county Hampshire saying they were devastated by his loss.

Smith played 62 Tests and 71 one-day internationals for England between 1988 and 1996 and was a resolute middle-order bulwark for the side during often difficult times for the team. He particularly excelled against pace, making his highest Test score of 175 against the fearsome West Indies attack at Antigua in 1994.

The revolutionary spirit in politics and architecture; histories of free speech and civil war; plus how the Tories fell apart and Starmer won

We live in a hyper-political yet curiously unrevolutionary age, one of hashtags rather than barricades. Perhaps that’s why so many writers this year have looked wistfully back to a time when strongly held convictions still made waves in the real world.

In The Revolutionists (Bodley Head), Jason Burke revisits the 1970s, when it seemed the future of the Middle East might end up red instead of green – communist rather than Islamist. It’s a geopolitical period piece: louche men with corduroy jackets and sideburns, women with theories and submachine guns. Many were in it less for the Marxism than for the sheer mayhem. Reading about the hijackings and kidnappings they orchestrated makes today’s orange-paint protests seem quaint by comparison.

Twenty-four tiny drawers of fun stuff sounds delightful – but not when you’re the one filling the thing

Maybe 10 years ago, I bought permanent Advent calendars for the kids: Scandi-looking Christmas houses with 24 tiny drawers, from Sainsbury’s. I think my original plan was that some of the draws could contain something other than chocolate, not because I’m the kind of almond mum who won’t let anyone eat sweets before breakfast, but because their dad and I are separated and have them half the time each, so it wasn’t unusual for them to wake up and have six Lindt chocolate balls to chomp through before they’d opened their curtains.

The tiny drawers are a curse. Some years I could only find stuff for one of the kids (erasers in the shape of hedgehogs; lip balm); other years, a different one was in luck (Lego Yodas; magnets). It was never, ever fair. One year, I found tons of different batteries for the drawers, and I thought it was the most genius thing I’d ever done, but they said: “How is this a fun gift? If we needed a battery, we’d just go to the kitchen drawer, which is supposed to have batteries in it.” I realised in about 2019 that I’d just have to start planning earlier, around July, if I wanted to strike the perfect balance of parity, festivity and usefulness, and that was a good year, actually. I found some tiny business cards with swear words on them that they could just leave around the house, and ear-splitting whistles and unisex lip balm. We have enough erasers and pencil sharpeners now to last until nobody ever makes a mistake because the written word is just a memory.

The site isn’t exposing misleading reporting – it’s revealing the bubble Trump increasingly inhabits

Donald Trump has used the mainstream press as a punching bag for many years, but in recent weeks his jabs have become even more frequent – and more ill-tempered.

He threatened to sue the BBC for $1bn last month over the editing of a documentary that aired more than a year ago. He called one White House reporter “piggy”, and told another – the well-regarded Mary Bruce of ABC News – that she was a “terrible person and a terrible reporter”. He called a New York Times reporter “ugly, both inside and out”.

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture

Four years after workers at a Starbucks store in upstate New York became the first to unionize, hundreds of outlets followed – defying intense resistance from the coffee chain. What happened next?

Thousands of Starbucks baristas are on strike across the US, warning the world’s largest coffee chain to brace for the “longest and biggest” bout of industrial action in its history.

Barely a year after Brian Niccol, the Starbucks CEO, tried to draw a line under bitter divisions between its management and unionized workers, pledging to “engage constructively” with them, the American coffee giant is now grappling with an escalating strike during its lucrative holiday trading season.

Cristina Dorador is on an urgent mission in the world’s highest desert, the Atacama in Chile. As the rise of drug-resistant superbugs kills millions per year, Cristina has made it her mission to uncover new, life-saving antibiotics in the stunning salt flats she has studied since she was 14. Against the magnificent backdrop of endless plains, microscopic discoveries lead her team of scientists to question how critically lithium mining is damaging the delicate ecosystem and impacting Indigenous communities

British No 1 on home comforts of Bromley, joys of commuting and being ‘creeped out’ by paparazzi

Emma Raducanu has garnered many endorsement deals in her nascent career, but there is perhaps one elusive sponsorship that would be most pleasing to the British No 1 women’s tennis player: ambassador of the London Borough of Bromley.

During a roundtable discussion with tennis journalists at the end of a gruelling yet satisfying season, Raducanu is merely attempting to describe a quiet off-season spent in her family home when she finds herself delivering a sales pitch about the benefits of living in Bromley. “I’m just so settled,” she says. “I’ve barely been in the UK this year because I’ve been competing so much, but I think just spending really good quality time with my parents has been so nice. I have loved just being in Bromley. It just reminds me of when I was a younger kid and it’s the same bedroom, same everything.

Artist Naima Green has explored the concept and expectations of motherhood in a solo exhibition called Instead, I spin fantasies which is currently on show at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City. The photos, which are a mix of real and semi-fictional, feature Green herself with a prosthetic pregnant belly and others in her life and community. ‘I’m trying to explore a very expansive picture across different geographies, different classes, different ideas of family, just as a way of seeing, understanding or creating different possibilities for family-making,’ she said in a recent interview

The use of ‘nudify’ apps is becoming more and more prevalent, with hundreds of teachers having seen images created by pupils, often of their peers. The fallout is huge – and growing fast

‘It worries me that it’s so normalised. He obviously wasn’t hiding it. He didn’t feel this was something he shouldn’t be doing. It was in the open and people saw it. That’s what was quite shocking.”

A headteacher is describing how a teenage boy, sitting on a bus on his way home from school, casually pulled out his phone, selected a picture from social media of a girl at a neighbouring school and used a “nudifying” app to doctor her image.

Even a second place finish could be enough for the McLaren driver to become the first Australian world champion in 45 years – though he’ll need some luck along the way

If Oscar Piastri is going to break through for Australia’s first Formula One driver title in 45 years, it’s going to be the hard way.

The McLaren driver enters this weekend’s final round in Abu Dhabi trailing teammate Lando Norris and Red Bull’s four-time reigning champion Max Verstappen in the standings.