Housing minister shoots down idea floated by Maroš Šefčovič designed to help reset UK-EU discussions

In his interview with the BBC, Maroš Šefčovič, the vice president of the European commission who is in charge of the commission’s post-Brexit relations with the UK, criticised the way Labour government has discussed the proposal for a youth mobility scheme.

Ministers have repeatedly ruled out joining a youth mobility scheme, implying that this would be tantamount to accepting EU free movement rules – which voters were widely seen to have rejected when they voted for Brexit in 2016.

It is not freedom of movement. We have been very clear what we’ve been proposing.

We, of course, welcome the positive, constructive tone from Commissioner Šefčovič.

We’re always looking for ways to reduce barriers of trade, but within our manifesto red lines, because we take a pragmatic view as to where the national interest lies.

Aside from legal challenges, those who didn’t vote for the man have little means of resisting – and are frankly still in shock

It is a strange effect of the second Trump presidency that, where Donald Trump and his allies know the ropes this time round and have grown in assertiveness, their opposition seems paralysed, rather than emboldened, by experience. After Trump’s inauguration in 2017, millions of people took to the streets. This week, a lot of Trump-haters in Washington simply skipped town for the inauguration weekend. This, it seems to me, is less an indication of resignation than caution and lingering shock. Whatever happened last time didn’t work. So now what?

It is an unnerving position, not knowing what to do, and in this case requires a lot of self-soothing in the form of mantras, “It’s only four years”, and “He’s a lame duck, anyway” (because he cannot serve another term). Opposition will not be about sending a message through the medium of public demonstration – the time for that, clearly, has passed, not least because Trump won the popular vote.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

The reporter’s mother, Debra Tice, has not entered Syria to search for her son for nearly 10 years, but associations like Hostage Aid Worldwide have helped create renewed hope

Debra Tice had managed to gather her family in one place in early December – no easy feat given they were spread across the US and Australia. When they planned their reunion months before, the Tice family had no idea they would be together to watch the Assad regime fall after a lightning 11-day rebel offensive toppled the 53-year rule.

“It was amazing for us to be together like that – it doesn’t happen often – to watch that together,” Debra said from a hotel room in Damascus. Only one member of her family was missing from the reunion, her son Austin Tice, a journalist who was kidnapped at the age of 31 in a suburb outside Damascus in 2012, while reporting on the Syrian civil war.

As the captain of a royal research ship, I break ice to get to British stations in the Antarctic. It’s great fun - but getting stuck is always a risk

I have been working for the British Antarctic Survey since I was 19. I started icebreaking on my first trip to the Antarctic and got hooked. Now I am the captain of the royal research ship Sir David Attenborough and I find icebreaking addictive.

It’s unique in a maritime career to have the ability, even as a junior officer, to do quite intricate ship handling and manoeuvring at all stages. Ships break the ice continually, 24/7 – so the whole bridge team gets to do it.

Xbox, PC; Megagon Industries
The snowbound successor to Lonely Mountains: Downhill has its downsides but still delivers the same urgent thrills, even if team play isn’t a patch on the solo experience

I was obsessed with Lonely Mountains: Downhill, the minimalist mountain-biking game from 2019. Obsessed with it. I ran those courses over and over until I knew just when to brake, when my tyres would skid over a rock and when they’d catch and send me flying, when to power down a straight, and when to cautiously pick my way over ledges like a goat in Lycra. I found it deeply soothing, partly because of the soundtrack of tweeting birds and rustling leaves (punctuated only by the sickening thwack of a rider colliding with a boulder), but mostly because of the zen-like state of concentration needed to get down those mountains at speed without dying 300 times. I developed a perfect feel for the infinitesimal adjustments in trajectory that made the difference between shaving a second off a run and sailing off the path to land in a crumpled heap.

I have been looking forward to this snow-sports-based successor for years. Instead of sun, rocks and dirt, we have glittering snow; instead of a bike, we have skis. It couldn’t be that different, surely. I thought it would take me no time at all to find my ski legs. But the first few runs on these mountains were … humbling. I skidded backwards down slopes after trying to brake and turn at the same time; I smacked continually into trees; I flubbed jumps and skidded, puzzled and slowly rotating, across frozen lakes. The challenges on each course felt impossible. I don’t even want to talk about what happened on my first multiplayer race. It was humiliating.

• Forward costs initial £59.1m and is third January buy
• ‘This is a day I will never forget,’ says Egypt international

Manchester City have confirmed the signing of Omar Marmoush for €70m (£59.1m) plus €5m in add-ons from Eintracht Frankfurt and have agreed to loan Kyle Walker to Milan, who have an option to buy the defender in summer.

Marmoush, who has a four-and-a-half-year contract, is the Premier League champions’ third acquisition of the window. He follows the defenders Vitor Reis, bought from Palmeiras for £29.6m, and Abdukodir Khusanov, signed for £33.8m from Lens, taking City’s spend to £122.5m.

Sister of murdered judge Giovanni Falcone describes it as an offence to all those who have fought organised crime

A board game based on the mafia wars that raged in Sicily in the 1980s has caused controversy in Italy, with the sister of the murdered anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone describing it as an offence to all those who had fought to free Italy of organised crime.

La Famiglia: The Great Mafia War, produced by the German firm Boardgame Atelier, won last year’s As d’Or, or Golden Ace, a prestigious prize given at an annual games festival in France.

Vladimir Putin victory would lead to bloc’s members spending ‘trillions’ more on defence, says Mark Rutte

• Business live – latest updates

The head of the Nato military alliance has called for a “step up” in support for Ukraine, to put Kyiv in the strongest position to achieve a sustainable peace deal with Russia.

Speaking on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mark Rutte warned against scaling back support for Ukraine, saying it was essential to “change the trajectory of the war”.

We’d like to find out how actively involved people are in saving for their pension

We are interested in finding out more about different pension systems around the world and how engaged people are with their savings plan.

If you are still working, how actively are you involved in your pension and do you think it will be enough when you retire? If not, what are your plans for when you stop working? What, if anything, do you think you will get from your state pension?

Dug out of the vault for a 40th anniversary version of Private Dancer, this glossy rock track gains much-needed rawness from Turner

In a world where august artists’ back catalogues have become big business, the music industry has become impressively adept at convincing people to shell out for yet another version of albums they already own. The deluxe edition has been supplanted by the super-deluxe edition. Once, albums were merely remastered to sound better, but now they’re entirely deconstructed then reassembled in surround sound, ultimate mixes, even – in the case of John Lennon’s Mind Games – as a beatless ambient aid to meditation.

Accordingly, you might have thought that the sessions for Tina Turner’s 1984 solo breakthrough Private Dancer had been thoroughly ransacked a decade ago, by a 30th anniversary edition that appended 15 extra B-sides, out-takes, live recordings and adjacent songs to the original album. But that would underestimate the indefatigability of record companies when it comes to parting fans from their cash. For Private Dancer’s slightly belated 40th anniversary – its first major anniversary since its author’s death in 2023 – the album is expanded to a mind-boggling five discs of material, the attention-grabbing jewel among which is a hitherto unknown track from the archives: Hot for You Baby. But unlike Face It Alone, the previously unreleased song appended to the similarly extensive “collector’s edition” of Queen’s penultimate album The Miracle in 2022, Hot for You Baby doesn’t seem to have been left unfinished and subsequently polished up.

As we approach this weekend’s championship games, we look at how the Chiefs, Eagles, Commanders and Bills can go all the way

The Bills offense is a machine, with Josh Allen playing the best all-around ball of his career. But the Bills will only go as deep as McDermott, their head coach and defensive architect, can take them.

The short, blazing life of Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola

Of all the great intellectuals of the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola is surely the most personally captivating. “He wins one on,” as the Victorian essayist Walter Pater put it, his life having “some touch of sweetness in it”. An Italian aristocrat who dabbled in magic and escaped from prison after eloping with the wife of a Medici lord, his books were burned on the orders of the pope. Edward Wilson-Lee’s new biography brings us the events of Pico’s short, blazing life, but also what is most strange and attractive about him: the wonder of a scholar who felt himself on the verge of being able to commune with angels.

The basic facts are straightforward. Born in northern Italy in 1463, he was a child prodigy with astonishing powers of memory. (He is said to have been able to recite the whole of Dante’s Divine Comedy backwards.) The story of Pico’s education has something of the feel of a video game, a tour through the great universities of Europe – Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Paris – completing some branch of knowledge – law, medicine, the classical languages – before moving on to the next level.

Government and opposition parties have met to resolve political standoff that disrupted yesterday’s Dáil sitting, reports RTÉ

Donald Trump should be wary of giving Vladimir Putin too much prominence by agreeing to an early summit on Ukraine, Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski argued in Davos.

Here is his argument in full:

President Trump has started well by recognising that it is Putin who needs to shift his position, not Ukraine.

If I can make one suggestion to the new administration, coming from the depths of experience of a country that warned the rest of the world about Putin and was not always listened to, it is this: this is not the Putin that Trump knew in his first term.

I think the main thing is to engage with him. When there are concerns or issues raised about what the new administration will do I think the best thing is to go to Washington and discuss.

Back in 2017, some allies thought we should just freeze our relations with the US, do almost nothing, and hope things would improve after the next elections.

• Live updates from the last-four matches in Melbourne
• Get in touch! Email Daniel Harris with your thoughts

Sabalenka 0-1 Badosa* (denotes server) A big service-winner down the T makes 15-all, but Sabalenka takes control of the next point with a booming forehand return, cleaning up with with another down the line Then, facing a second serve, she steps in a little and starts thwacking … but just when15-40 seems a matter of time, a backhand on the stretch and on to the line hauls Badosa back into the point and eventually the error comes; 30-all. But a double presents break point; another service-winner confiscates it, and so far, the underdog is coping with the pressure well, as I type spanking an ace down the T for advantage. And though she oughtn’t win the next rally, Sabalenka in at the net and unable to finish, she makes her opponent play enough balls such that the error comes. Badosa is into this!

Badosa to serve and ready … play.

• Updates from Canberra (7.15pm AEDT/8.15am GMT)
• Australia retain Ashes after winning first T20

4th over: Australia 36-0 (Mooney 32, Voll 0) Beth Mooney is flying. She comes down the track to drive the new bowler Charlie Dean over mid-off for her sixth four. Dean moves over the wicket, so Mooney skips down to crash a drive between the two cover fielders. That’s a glorious stroke.

Mooney has 32 from 23 balls, Voll 0 from 2.

As Donald Trump says he wants a speedy end to the war, Betsy West wonders what form that will take, as her film offers a platform to the children caught up in the conflict

Director and producer Betsy West is best known for her lively, intimate portraits of remarkable women: her documentary RBG, for example, a profile of the late US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; and Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down, about the US congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt in 2011.

Her latest project, though, is quite different. Once Upon a Time in Ukraine, which has been shortlisted for an Oscar, is a documentary she made working with footage she did not shoot on the ground herself. Instead, it was assembled by a Ukrainian team, headed by the director of photography, Andriy Kalashnikov. The material is, in some ways, more in tune with her old life as a news producer for ABC: the effect on Ukrainian children of Russia’s full-scale invasion. It is a huge story that has barely been told, and will reverberate for decades – if not generations – after the war has ended.

Marco Rubio discusses ‘significance of agreement for regional security and stability’ in calls to regional leaders

We reported earlier that the Trump administration is said to be insisting that Israel stick to the 60 day time limit for withdrawing its troops from Lebanon, as per the terms of November’s ceasefire deal.

Haaretz is carrying fuller quotes from US ambassador to Israel, Michael Herzog, speaking to Israel’s Army Radio. It quotes him saying:

The agreement included a 60-day target for completing the IDF’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon and for the Lebanese Army to take its place, but it isn’t set in stone and was phrased with some flexibility.

We are in discussions with the Trump administration to extend the time needed to enable the Lebanese Army to truly deploy and fulfil its role under the agreement. These discussions are ongoing.

Rolling coverage from the World Economic Forum in Davos

Javier Milei then takes a swing at feminism, telling delegates at Davos that it’s wrong to make femicide a seperate crime with tougher sentences than for murdering a man.

You are legally making a woman’s life worth more than a man, he argues.

Manchester United paid Ajax €100m for a player who has more bookings than goals or assists in the Premier League

By Ben McAleer for WhoScored

“We are the worst team maybe in the history of Manchester United​,” said Ruben Amorim after Sunday’s 3-1 defeat at home to Brighton. The manager ​had paced up and down the touchline as his side managed just one shot on target in the match – and that was a Bruno Fernandes penalty.

United were always going to need time to adapt to the manager’s ideas but even he knows that a return of 11 points from 11 games is not good enough. “Imagine what this is for a fan of Manchester United, imagine what this is for me,” said Amorim. “We are getting a new coach who is losing more than the last coach.”

Why am I writing about the fifth most famous spinner from the West Indies? Because it matters for Test cricket

There was a lovely moment after the Trinidad Test a couple of years back. With the final day’s play between India and West Indies washed out and the match drawn, Ravindra Jadeja and Jomel Warrican went up to the top of the covered stand to chat spin bowling.

And, you know, really chat about it. The dirty, under-the-counter stuff. Alignment, shoulder positions, approach angles, how to maintain efficiency of momentum into the delivery stride. The stuff that, to those uninitiated in the art and argot of left-arm red-ball spin bowling, might barely even register as English. Just two master craftsmen talking about their arcane, esoteric and very possibly dying craft.

Fans of the flower – known as Putricia – say they are ‘obsessed’ with the plant, although they have ‘never smelt that before’

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

In Sydney, word is spreading: a rare endangered plant named after a deformed penis is beginning to unfurl.

Outside Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden greenhouse on Thursday, a diverse crowd of hundreds has formed. International tourists wait expectantly by families and young, trendy couples. Babies are everywhere.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email

A sculptor embarks on a philosophical quest in this revelatory tale of love and loss, exploring our relationship with the divine

In 2020, when the statue of slaver Edward Colston was toppled into Bristol harbour, the public were treated to weeks of confected outrage and faux-philosophising about the aesthetic, civic and social meaning of sculpture. Around the edges of the reactionary culture war nonsense were occasional good-faith attempts to grapple with how best to talk and think about these large, static objects that pepper what is left of the public realm. Lumps of stone and brass; often representational, often hagiographic, often stately, often decaying, and often deeply, unnervingly strange.

It is precisely this sense of strangeness – of statues hovering somewhere between architecture and painting, and between repose and movement – that animates the latest novel by the Irish artist and writer Adrian Duncan. From its opening pages, The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth dives into heady, knotty questions about temporality, the occupation of space, the relative finitude of life, the fine line between observation and devotion, and the futility of attempting to render the numinous using only chisel and stone. This, in case I’m not being clear, is a relentlessly high-minded and serious novel. The enjoyably preposterous title is not a joke but an earnest indication of what is at stake; the old-school, unfashionable desire to explore what, if anything at all, life really means.

By avoiding the standard cliches, the far-right leader comes across as moderate even as she backs extremist rhetoric

“Alice? Who the fuck is Alice?” wondered European audiences in 1995 when the Dutch band Gompie landed an unlikely success by adding this risque line to Smokie’s 1970s hit Living Next Door to Alice. Thirty years on, the question is on many minds again, this time regarding the mercurial co-leader of Germany’s buoyant anti-immigration party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Ahead of the German elections on 23 February, many want to know: who exactly is Alice Weidel?

It’s a pertinent question. For the first time since the Nazi era, a far-right party has ambitions to head a German government. The AfD is fielding the 45-year-old Weidel as its first-ever chancellor candidate. She is unlikely to win office this time, but her party is polling in second place and set to double its vote share to over 20%.

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and journalist. Her latest book is Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

Photographer Richard Sharum visited the central states – condescendingly dismissed for years – to see if he could find any unifying aspects of national spirit