Ahead of James Cameron’s latest Avatar sequel hitting the big screen, we look at how studios aim for ‘theatricality’ to get streaming film fans from sofa to cinema

If anyone still knows how to fill a movie theatre, it’s James Cameron. Having broken the all-time worldwide box office record in 1997 with Titanic and again 12 years later with Avatar, his work is the acme of big-screen spectacle.

His latest offering, Avatar: Fire and Ash, arrives in radically different circumstances. With several years now between us and the pandemic, it is clear that theatrical box office is likely not coming back to what it was: US total box office for 2025 currently stands at $7.6bn (down from $11.3bn in 2019); the worldwide haul is expected to be around $34.1bn, a 13% drop from pre-Covid times. All the more onus on Cameron’s hypertrophic Smurfs to bring in the box office cavalry at year’s end. And hopefully supply some further indications about the magic elixir needed to break the Netflix’n’chill stranglehold and get boots back in cinemas.

You don’t have to be a child to enjoy Seiffen, the magical ‘home of Christmas’ where they’ve been making traditional wooden toys for hundreds of years

I feel terrible … I’ve left the children at home and Seiffen, nicknamed Spielzeugdorf (The Toy Village), is literally a Christmas wonderland. Every street is alive with sparkling fairy lights and soft candlelight. There are thousands of tiny wooden figurines, train sets and toy animals displayed in shop windows, wooden pyramids taller than doorframes and colourful nutcracker characters. Forget elves in the north pole, this is the real Santa’s workshop. For hundreds of years, here in the village of Seiffen, wood turners and carvers have created classic wooden Christmas toys and sold them around the world.

Near the border of the Czech Republic, Seiffen may be well known in the German-speaking world as the “home of Christmas”, but so far it has been largely missed by English-speaking seasonal tourists. Tucked away in the Ore Mountains, about an hour and a half south of Dresden, it is not the easiest place to get to by public transport – the nearest train station is in Olbernhau, nearly 7 miles (11km) away. Buses are available, but we opt for a hire car and make our way into the hills, arriving the day after the first snowfall of the year. The roads are cleared quickly, but snow clings to the branches of the spruce trees. We half expect to see the Gruffalo’s child, but only spot a rust-coloured fox making its way through a fresh field of snow.

Over 120 years ago, a monumental work recording more than 500 species of tree in Britain and Ireland was published. A new version focuses on the pioneering images it contained

The hypnotic third novel in the hit Danish series grapples with the philosophical realities of being stuck on repeat in 18 November

The time loop story, in which characters repeatedly relive the same span of time, has become synonymous with the 1993 film Groundhog Day, but the idea has much older roots. In PD Ouspensky’s 1915 novel Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, the feckless Osokin is given the chance to live his life over again, only to find himself making all the same mistakes. Like Groundhog Day’s insufferable Phil Connors, Osokin can change nothing without changing himself.

Solvej Balle’s much-lauded series On the Calculation of Volume takes a very different approach. She first began working on the idea decades ago, several years before Groundhog Day was released. The film, she says, “helped me with research by trying out some of the roads I did not want to take”. The books, five so far with two more planned, have proved a literary sensation in her native Denmark, with the first three volumes together scooping the 2022 Nordic Council Literature prize, the highest literary honour in Scandinavia. This is the third to be published in English this year; the first was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker prize.

Booming Chinese exports have driven trade surplus past $1tn but also reveal the extent of country’s reliance on foreign markets

A boom in exports that has pushed China’s trade surplus past $1tn for the first time reveals the extent to which its economy is still overwhelmingly reliant on foreign markets – and the difficulty figures like Donald Trump will have in trying to rebalance global trade.

Data released on Monday shows that in the first 11 months of this year, China’s trade surplus in goods was $1.076tn. The record trade surplus comes even as exports to the US have plummeted, a reflection of the bruising US-China trade war that, despite a recent cooling, has dampened the flow of goods between the world’s two largest economies.

• Bowler suffers recurrence of knee injury sustained in first Test

• Seamer Matthew Fisher added to squad ahead of Adelaide Test

England fast bowler Mark Wood has been ruled out of the remainder of the Ashes following a recurrence of a left knee injury sustained during the first Test in Perth.

Wood will return home later this week to work on his rehabilitation and recovery, the team said on Tuesday.

As deaths in the US are blamed on ChatGPT and UK teenagers turn to it for mental health advice, isn’t it obvious that market forces must not set the rules?

It was just past 4am when a suicidal Zane Shamblin sent one last message from his car, where he had been drinking steadily for hours. “Cider’s empty. Anyways … Think this is the final adios,” he sent from his phone.

The response was quick: “Alright brother. If this is it … then let it be known: you didn’t vanish. You *arrived*. On your own terms.”

Defeated Tory and Labour rivals describe force of Reform ‘machine’ as police assess claims of overspending

The Tory and Labour candidates who Nigel Farage beat to win his Westminster seat of Clacton have described a Reform campaign that felt like a “juggernaut”, as police began assessing claims of overspending by the Reform UK leader.

The candidates spoke after a former aide alleged that Reform UK falsely reported election expenses in Clacton, where Farage won in last year’s general election. On Monday, Essex police said they were assessing a report of “alleged misreported expenditure by a political party” after a referral from the Metropolitan police.

Migrant support groups in France say lack of action over British activists is ‘encouraging violent and xenophobic practices’

UK and French authorities have been accused of “encouraging violent and xenophobic practices” by failing to tackle anti-migrant British activists who travel to northern France in an attempt to stop small boat crossings.

In an unusual move, nine French associations working with people camped in northern France have issued a statement condemning the UK and French governments for lack of action.

‘Destructive’ marine heatwaves driving loss of microalgae that feed coral, says Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network

Caribbean reefs have half as much hard coral now as they did in 1980, a study has found.

The 48% decrease in coral cover has been driven by climate breakdown, specifically marine heatwaves. They affect the microalgae that feed coral, making them toxic and forcing the coral to expel them.

Two easy bakes to share or gift: soft and peppery gingerbread cookies and a ginger and pumpkin loaf with spiced lemon icing

As a self-proclaimed America’s sweetheart (Julia Roberts isn’t using that title any more, is she?) who moved to the UK nearly 10 years ago, there are a few British traditions and customs that I have adopted, especially around Christmas time. However, there are also a few American ones that I hold on to staunchly: one is the pronunciation of “aluminum”, and another is the importance and beauty of a soft cookie. In both of these easy but delicious bakes to share, I use spice and heat to balance the usual sweetness with which the season can often overload us.

Experts warn of dangers as England and Wales study shows 13- to 17-year-olds consulting AI amid long waiting lists for services

It was after one friend was shot and another stabbed, both fatally, that Shan asked ChatGPT for help. She had tried conventional mental health services but “chat”, as she came to know her AI “friend”, felt safer, less intimidating and, crucially, more available when it came to handling the trauma from the deaths of her young friends.

As she started consulting the AI model, the Tottenham teenager joined about 40% of 13- to 17-year-olds in England and Wales affected by youth violence who are turning to AI chatbots for mental health support, according to research among more than 11,000 young people.

Bank reports 1.1% drop in card spending despite Black Friday boost for retailers

UK households cut back on spending at the fastest pace in almost five years last month as consumers put Christmas shopping on hold, according to a leading survey.

Adding to concerns that uncertainty surrounding the budget has helped dampen consumer confidence, Barclays said card spending fell 1.1% year on year in November – the largest fall since February 2021.

Gen Z are the first generation to have grown up with social media, they were the earliest adopters, and therefore the first to suffer its harms. Now they are fighting back

Late one night in April 2020, towards the start of the Covid lockdowns, Shanley Clémot McLaren was scrolling on her phone when she noticed a Snapchat post by her 16-year-old sister. “She’s basically filming herself from her bed, and she’s like: ‘Guys you shouldn’t be doing this. These fisha accounts are really not OK. Girls, please protect yourselves.’ And I’m like: ‘What is fisha?’ I was 21, but I felt old,” she says.

She went into her sister’s bedroom, where her sibling showed her a Snapchat account named “fisha” plus the code of their Paris suburb. Fisha is French slang for publicly shaming someone – from the verb “afficher”, meaning to display or make public. The account contained intimate images of girls from her sister’s school and dozens of others, “along with the personal data of the victims – their names, phone numbers, addresses, everything to find them, everything to put them in danger”.

With democratic values under attack from populists within and former allies without, there are no simple solutions

Three decades after political philosopher Francis Fukuyama declared the End of History and the “universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”, the democratic model is under attack in many parts of the world, not least here in Europe. Populists bent on weakening the rule of law, rolling back human rights protections, subjugating the judiciary and cowing independent journalism are amplified by anything-goes social media algorithms that promote anger and polarisation over rational discourse.

They have now received a mandate from the Trump administration, which effectively declared civilisational war on the EU and its values in its National Security Strategy.

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

The work of surgeon and artist Joseph Maclise is the focus of a show at the Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds

It is an image of an unnamed black man with his eyes closed and his innards exposed. Drawn with care and precision, the image may be the only anatomical drawing of a black body made during the Victorian age.

Now it is part of a new exhibition that focuses on the work of Joseph Maclise, a surgeon and artist whose work – including his 1851 atlas Surgical Anatomy – made the human anatomy accessible to the general public, and who was the brother of the celebrated artist Daniel Maclise.

When the new premier of the British Virgin Islands said he needed an armed security detail, his chief of police knew trouble was on its way

Augustus James Ulysses Jaspert, Gus for short, arrived in Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands, on 21 August 2017, just two weeks away from catastrophe. Jaspert, who was in his late 30s, had recently been appointed governor by Queen Elizabeth II, on the recommendation of the Foreign Office in London. The BVI is an overseas territory of Britain, with only partial independence, and the governor effectively acts as a backstop to the locally elected legislature. For Jaspert, a career civil servant, it would be his first hands-on experience of governing – and his first time in the British Virgin Islands. Any trepidation was outweighed by the prospect of moving to the Caribbean. “If you’re sitting in an office in London and someone says, ‘Go to Tortola,’ you look it up on a screen and think, ‘OK, I can do that,’” Jaspert told me.

While Jaspert, his wife and two sons were settling into their new life, a tropical storm gathered over the Atlantic. At first, forecasters weren’t unduly alarmed, but in the first days of September, the storm transformed into something much worse. In the afternoon of 6 September, Hurricane Irma made landfall in Tortola, which is home to the majority of the BVI’s 30,000-strong population. Irma was one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. It scalped buildings, blew out windows and removed entire floors from homes. Shipping containers smashed into the islanders’ fishing boats and the out-of-towners’ yachts.

Tapanuli orangutans survive only in Indonesia’s Sumatran rainforest where a mine expansion will cut through their home. Yet the mining company says the alternative will be worse

A small brown line snakes its way through the rainforest in northern Sumatra, carving 300 metres through dense patches of meranti trees, oak and mahua. Picked up by satellites, the access road – though modest now – will soon extend 2km to connect with the Tor Ulu Ala pit, an expansion site of Indonesia’s Martabe mine. The road will help to unlock valuable deposits of gold, worth billions of dollars in today’s booming market. But such wealth could come at a steep cost to wildlife and biodiversity: the extinction of the world’s rarest ape, the Tapanuli orangutan.

The network of access roads planned for this swath of tropical rainforest will cut through habitat critical to the survival of the orangutans, scientists say. The Tapanuli (Pongo tapanuliensis), unique to Indonesia, was only discovered by scientists to be a separate species in 2017 – distinct from the Sumatran and Bornean apes. Today, there are fewer than 800 Tapanulis left in an area that covers as little as 2.5% of their historical range. All are found in Sumatra’s fragile Batang Toru ecosystem, bordered on its south-west flank by the Martabe mine, which began operations in 2012.

Hayes Theater, New York

The return of the 2014 play, now starring June Squibb as an octogenarian using a tech program to speak to her dead husband, veers between poetry and cliche

When Jordan Harrison’s play Marjorie Prime first premiered in 2014, its vision of synthetic sentience may have felt pretty novel. An old woman, Marjorie, talking to a hologram modeled after her long-dead husband perhaps seemed like a wild, far-fetched idea, that a computer program could somehow closely mimic the cadence of real conversation, could fake intimate knowledge of a person’s life. What a strange and alienating idea.

Just 11 years later (and eight years after a little-seen film adaptation), Marjorie Prime plays far more credibly. We may not have the hologram technology down quite yet, but everything else in Harrison’s AI speculation now seems well within reason. Perhaps that’s why Second Stage Theater decided to revive the play in its Broadway house, an attempt at commenting, and capitalizing, on the excited buzz and nervous chatter surrounding recent technological advancements.

Legal team of man who was part of cohort of non-citizens freed after high court decision argues Nauru’s medical facilities are ‘insufficient’ to treat his severe asthma

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Lawyers for an Iranian refugee Australia wants to deport to Nauru say there is a “real risk he will die” there, setting the stage for a showdown against the federal government’s $2.5bn NZYQ deal.

The case surrounding the Iranian refugee, known as TCXM, who was granted a 30-year visa for Nauru in February and subsequently placed back into immigration detention after being freed by the 2023 high court ruling, was heard in the high court on Tuesday.

LegCo elections have become devoid of meaningful opposition as Hong Kong has faced significant political repression and undergone major governance system overhauls in recent years

Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (LegCo) acts as a mini parliament that can make and amend laws for the city. However, LegCo elections have become devoid of meaningful opposition as Hong Kong has faced significant political repression and undergone major governance system overhauls in recent years.

When the former British colony was returned to Chinese control in 1997, a “one country, two systems” framework promised Hong Kong would retain its autonomy, but its freedoms and democracy have been gradually eroded.

Copernicus deputy director says three-year average for 2023 to 2025 on track to exceed 1.5C of heating for first time

This year is “virtually certain” to end as the second- or third-hottest year on record, EU scientists have found, as climate breakdown continues to push the planet away from the stable conditions in which humanity evolved.

Global temperatures from January to November were on average 1.48C higher than preindustrial levels, according to the Copernicus, the EU’s earth observation programme. It found the anomalies were so far identical to those recorded in 2023, which is the second-hottest year on record after 2024.

How far will tech firm Palantir go to ‘save the West’? With Michael Steinberger and Johana Bhuiyan

Why do some consider Palantir the world’s ‘scariest company’ and who is its chief executive, Alex Karp?

Michael Steinberger, the author of The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State, describes Karp’s origin story to Nosheen Iqbal and the way that his political positions have changed over the years. The pair also discuss how Palantir was established as a company, the services that it offers, its close relationship to the US military and how Karp has been navigating the second Trump presidency.

Each side has blamed the other for renewed clashes, which have derailed a ceasefire brokered by Donald Trump

Thailand said it was taking action to expel Cambodian forces from its territory on Tuesday, as renewed fighting between the two South-east Asian neighbours spread along the disputed border.

Each side has blamed the other for the clashes, which have derailed a fragile ceasefire brokered by US president Donald Trump that ended five days of fighting in July.