Released documents detail the assembly line-like process with which Jeffrey Epstein procured underage victims
By the mid-2000s, Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teen girls was routine. From 2002 to 2005 alone, the late financier victimized “dozens” of underage teens by luring them into sex acts for payment under the auspices of massage work, some as young as 14, prosecutors said.
Epstein leaned on a coterie of employees and associates – including British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell – to secure a “steady supply of minor victims”. He also enlisted his victims to recruit other girls under the false pretense of providing massages, prosecutors said.
Swerve the stress on New Year’s Eve and serve up a buffet comprising one big dish with plenty of sides, like this chicken and rice with amba, an amazing, tangy Iraqi condiment
New Year’s Eve has always struck me as the most treacherous of nights. Not because of the drink, or the fireworks, or the pressure of staying awake past midnight (although that alone should qualify as an endurance sport). Like Valentine’s Day and your birthday, what makes New Year’s Eve perilous is the collective insistence that this night has to deliver: the best meal, the best party, the best version of ourselves. High expectations that will inevitably lead to disappointment, and haven’t we had our fair share of that already?
There was one year in the restaurant when we convinced ourselves that the only way to rise to the occasion was a set menu of showstoppers. We thought we had predicted everything, and we assumed (boldly, wrongly) that everyone would choose the chocolate dessert. It made sense: who wouldn’t want chocolate on the most celebratory night of the year? So the tarte tatin went on the menu as a polite alternative, a back-up singer, not the star. Except, of course, everyone wanted the tarte tatin.
Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are to meet on Sunday to discuss a plan to end the war in Ukraine, amid continuing Russian attacks on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, and scepticism that Moscow is willing to drop any of its maximalist demands.
Zelenskyy arrived in Florida on Saturday night with a Ukrainian delegation, before talks with the US president at his Mar-a-Lago residence. The two leaders are expected to discuss the latest iteration of a 20-point peace plan and the unresolved question of the future of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
Batter says changing management would be ‘silly’ but questions remain over whether the current setup is producing the best players
In fairness to Australian cricket, it rarely sticks its head in the sand. On Sunday in Melbourne, when 90,000 fans should have been enjoying day three of the fourth Test, they put Matt Page, chief curator at the MCG, in front of the media to face a grilling over that casino of a two-day pitch.
Page was contrite, admitted his mistakes, and vowed to never repeat the 10mm of grass that, while designed to guard against hotter weather later in the match, delivered a second hammer blow to Cricket Australia’s finances this series. For all the public anger Stuart Fox, the ground’s chief executive, did not sound as if he was about to issue Page with his marching orders.
The new film adaptation by Saltburn director Emerald Fennell looks set to be provocative – but nowhere near as shocking as Emily Brontë’s original
The most astonishing thing about the first trailer for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is not the extreme closeup of dough being kneaded into submission. It’s not that in the lead roles Margot Robbie is blonde and 35, and Jacob Elordi is white, when Emily Brontë described Cathy as a teen brunette and Heathcliff as “a dark-skinned gypsy”. It’s not the gaudy splendour of the interiors – silver walls, plaster Greek gods spewing strings of pearls, blood-red floors and a flesh-pink wall for clutching and licking. It’s not Robbie’s gobstopper diamonds or her scarlet sunglasses or her stuffing grass into her mouth or the loud snip of her corset laces being slashed with a knife or her elaborately – erotically – bound hair as she contemplates multiple silver cake stands stacked with vertiginous fruit puddings. It’s not any of her dresses – the red latex number or the perfectly 1980s off-the-shoulder wedding dress topped by yards of veil half-wuthered off her head. Nor is it any of the times Elordi takes his top off.
The most astonishing thing is that the trailer says Wuthering Heights is “the greatest love story of all time”. Which is almost exactly how the 1939 Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon film was trailed – as “the greatest love story of our time … or any time!” Have we learned nothing? I am not talking about the fact that (like Oberon’s!) Robbie’s wedding dress is white, which is not period-correct. This has exercised many people on the internet. I’m more worried about the fact that almost a century since Olivier’s film, we are still calling it a love story – a great one! The greatest! It’s being released the day before Valentine’s Day! – when what actually happens is that Cathy rejects Heathcliff because she’s a snob, and he turns into a psychopath.
From companionship to psychotherapy, technology could meet unmet needs – but it needs to be handled responsibly
There is much anxiety these days about the dangers of human-AI relationships. Reports of suicide and self-harm attributable to interactions with chatbots have understandably made headlines. The phrase “AI psychosis” has been used to describe the plight of people experiencing delusions, paranoia or dissociation after talking to large language models (LLMs). Our collective anxiety has been compounded by studies showing that young people are increasingly embracing the idea of AI relationships; half of teens chat with an AI companion at least a few times a month, with one in three finding conversations with AI “to be as satisfying or more satisfying than those with real‑life friends”.
But we need to pump the brakes on the panic. The dangers are real, but so too are the potential benefits. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that – depending on what future scientific research reveals – AI relationships could actually be a boon for humanity.
The Caatinga in the north-east has been transformed by the heating climate in just a generation and could become the country’s first desert
Every Tuesday at dawn, Raildon Suplício Maia goes to the market in Macururé, in Brazil’s Bahia state, to sell goats. He haggles with buyers to get a good price for the animals, which are reared in the open and roam freely.
Goats are the main – and sometimes only – source of income for the people of Macururé, a small town in the Brazilian sertão. This rural hinterland in the country’s north-east is known for its dry climate and harsh conditions.
Raildon Suplicio Maia, a goat farmer from Macururé sells his animals at the market. Grazing has disappeared and he now spends any profit on feed
Brigitte Bardot, the French actor and singer who became an international sex symbol before turning her back on the film industry and embracing the cause of animal rights activism, has died aged 91.
Among those paying tribute on Sunday was the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who wrote on social media that Bardot had “embodied a life of freedom” and “universal brilliance”. France was mourning “a legend of the century”, he said.
Maddy feels insecure if Luke isn’t in the mood, while he worries that he doesn’t measure up to her exes. But ultimately, their marriage has given the couple new freedom
Italy's most active volcano erupted on Saturday, prompting scientists to issue a red Volcano Observatory notice for aviation, signalling a potential risk for aircraft. Despite the alert, authorities said flights continued operating normally at Catania-Fontanarossa airport, adding that no disruption was expected unless ashfall increased
Volunteers and neighbours are restoring the century-old homes as an act of defiance against Russia’s assault
Lesia Danylenko proudly showed off her new front door. Volunteers had nicknamed its elegant transom window the “croissant”, a nod to its curved shape. “I think it’s more of a peacock,” she said, admiring its branch-like details. The restoration project at one of Kyiv’s early 20th-century art nouveau houses was supported by residents, who celebrated with two pavement parties.
It was also an act of resistance against Russia, she explained: “We are trying to live like normal people despite the war. It’s about arranging our life in the best possible way. We’re not afraid of staying in Ukraine. I could have left the country and moved away to Italy or Germany. Instead, I’m here. The new entrance shows our commitment to our homeland.”
Currently on stage in a play that provoked riots, the rising Irish actor is also stepping into Keane’s boots to replay a notorious footballing feud. But, he says, his country feels more empowered than ever before
Éanna Hardwicke cannot really remember Saipan. Not Saipan the place, a small Pacific Island 200km north-east of Guam. Nor, thankfully, Saipan the film, in which he stars, and which I’m hoping to discuss with him at length this afternoon. No, he means Saipan the incident, Saipan the event, Saipan the crisis that has baffled and incensed Ireland’s population for a quarter of a century.
We are sitting in a pleasantly boxy meeting room deep within the lungs of the National Theatre, a space so starkly concrete that the current king of England once described it as a clever way of building a nuclear power plant in the middle of London without anyone objecting. Hardwicke himself sports the quiet, thoughtful presence of a literature student, at times speaking like a particularly articulate MA who’s popped round to deliver a treatise on some dramatic works he just happens to be starring in. He’s here rehearsing a play that forms another contentious landmark in Ireland’s cultural history, but we’ll get to that once we move past the summer he turned five.
Take this hopeful thought into 2026: the tyrants we endure always falter, and their ‘seismic’ upheavals are usually false dawns
For those who lived through the cold war, the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, was an unforgettable moment. The sinister watch towers with their searchlights and armed guards, the minefields in no-man’s land, the notorious Checkpoint Charlie border post, and the Wall itself – all were swept aside in an extraordinary, popular lunge for freedom.
Less than a month later, on 3 December 1989, at a summit in Malta, US president George HW Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared that after more than 40 years, the cold war was over. All agreed it was a historic turning point.
Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator
Bardot … there was a time when it couldn’t be pronounced without a knowing pout on the second syllable. French headline-writers loved calling the world’s most desirable film star by her initials: “BB”, that is: bébé, a bit of weirdly infantilised tabloid pillow-talk. When Brigitte Bardot retired from the movies in the mid-70s, taking up the cause of animal rights and a ban on the import of baby seals, the French press took to calling her BB-phoque, a homophone of the French for “baby seal” with a nasty hint of an Anglo pun. But France’s love affair with Bardot was to curdle, despite her fierce patriotism and admiration for Charles de Gaulle (the feeling was reciprocated). As her animal rights campaigning morphed in the 21st century into an attack on halal meat, and then into shrill attacks on the alleged “Islamicisation” of France, her relations with the modern world curdled even more.
In the 1950s, before the sexual revolution, before the New Wave, before feminism, there was Bardot: she was sex, she was youth, and, more to the point, Bardot was modernity. She was the unacknowledged zeitgeist force that stirred cinema’s young lions such as François Truffaut against the old order. Bardot was the country’s most sensational cultural export; she was in effect the French Beatles, a liberated, deliciously shameless screen siren who made male American moviegoers gulp and goggle with desire in that puritan land where sex on screen was still not commonplace, and in which sexiness had to be presented in a demure solvent of comedy. Bardot may not have had the comedy skills of a Marilyn Monroe, but she had ingenuous charm and real charisma, a gentleness and sweetness, largely overlooked in the avalanche of prurience and sexist condescension.
PM Albin Kurti’s Self-Determination party may struggle to win majority after rival parties refused alliance
Voters in Kosovo are casting ballots in an early parliamentary election in the hope of breaking a political deadlock that has gripped the small Balkan nation for much of this year.
The snap vote was scheduled after the prime minister Albin Kurti’s governing Vetëvendosje, or Self-Determination, party failed to form a government despite winning the most votes in a 9 February election.
Chelsea intend to cooperate with the investigation
Emery plays down title talk after 11th consecutive win
Aston Villa lodged a complaint to Chelsea after a bottle of water was thrown at their bench at the end of their 2-1 victory at Stamford Bridge.
There were jubilant scenes at full time after a stunning comeback moved Villa three points off Arsenal at the top of the Premier League. However, the celebrations also featured the away dugout being showered with water when the final whistle was blown. It was not clear if the bottle was thrown by someone from the Chelsea bench or whether it came from the crowd. Chelsea intend to cooperate with the investigation.
Yoane Wissa is still not ready to make regular starts for Newcastle but Eddie Howe is keen to find the Congolese striker more opportunities in the coming weeks.
I think with Yoane, we’ve got to look after him, he’s still relatively early in his return. He did really well in his one start against Fulham, I was really pleased with him that day and there’ll be other opportunities.
The problem for us is with our schedule playing every three, four days, I don’t think he’s in a condition where he could start regularly at the moment. Hopefully we can manage him to that point at some stage.
C of E faces dilemma as far right claims Christianity to push agenda that often clashes with gospel message
Gary made sure he got to Whitehall early for the “unite the kingdom” (UTK) outdoor carol service in the run-up to Christmas. After about 150,000 people turned up for the last rally called by Tommy Robinson in September, the leader of the anti-migrant far-right movement, he wanted to be sure of a prime position.
He needn’t have worried. About 1,500 people – perhaps 1% of September’s turnout – came to Whitehall to sing carols and hear preachers in the twilight of a mid-December day. Robinson had publicly insisted the event was a non-political celebration of Christmas; maybe that deterred some of movement’s more ardent activists.
Both industries dominate the world but now face fundamental transformation and uncertainty at home
South Korea’s entertainment dominance appears unshakeable. From BTS conquering global charts to Parasite sweeping the Oscars in 2020 and Korean dramas topping Netflix, Korean popular culture has never been more visible. Exports driven by the country’s arts hit a record $15.18bn (£11bn) in 2024, cementing the country’s reputation as a cultural superpower.
But inside South Korea, the two industries that helped build the Korean Wave – cinema and K-pop – are now experiencing fundamental transformations, with their survival strategies potentially undermining the creative foundations of their success.
The band may be relatively new but its members have spent years steeped in the scene, giving them edge and an ear for tracks that rip through a room
From London, UK
Recommended if you like Metallica, Terror, Trapped Under Ice
Up next Performing at Collision festival, Bedford, 11 April
One of the surprise success stories of the last year has been the resurgence of hardcore. From the ascent of the young, Grammy-nominated bands Turnstile and Knocked Loose to the comeback of Deftones and their fresh grip on gen Z, as well as the growth of the UK festival Outbreak, heavy guitar music is enjoying a renaissance. After releasing their debut album, Faded Intentions, in November, False Reality might seem like a new name to watch in this world – but they have deep roots.
A sell-out crowd for the final helped deliver a once-in-a-lifetime experience as England’s captain Zoe Aldcroft raised the trophy after defeating Canada
Recalling the moment that England’s captain, Zoe Aldcroft, lifted the Rugby World Cup still brings goosebumps. Twickenham was bathed in September sunshine, there was not one empty green seat and when the Gloucester-Hartpury star raised the silverware with gold streamers and fire pyrotechnics, the roar from the crowd was a sound unmatched at any other women’s rugby game I have attended.
England had rewarded the home fans, executing the perfect gameplan against Canada, the in-form team who were the underdogs despite knocking out the six-time champions New Zealand in the semi-final. The stadium was sold out with a women’s rugby record of 81,885 creating an electric atmosphere. Future World Cup finals will be sell-outs with a party-feel celebration but I am unsure if anything will be able to replicate the feeling on 2025 final day for everyone invested in women’s rugby. There was a sense of overwhelming emotion of what the sport has grown into over the past few years. Now, the women’s game can not only sell out the biggest venues but also provide box office action and deliver an unforgettable experience.
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