• European playoff draws due to begin at 11am (GMT)
• Ten things to look out for this weekend | Mail Simon

Uefa are still preambling. I have learned that one side of the draw will be silver and the other side will be blue.

Uefa are going big on the preambles here, so I’ve got time to remind you of the basic rules. There are eight seeded teams and eight unseeded teams. The two seeded teams with the highest league finish will be drawn against the two unseeded teams with the lowest league finish and so on, until everyone’s paired up. So Atalanta will play Sporting or Brugge, and Borussia Dortmund will play the other one, while PSG will play Monaco or Brest and Benfica will get the other one. You can play teams from your own country, and teams you played in the group. Got it? Great.

• Test match, day two: England 170; Australia 422-5
• Eight dropped catches by England amid fielding misery

After a mere 90-year wait, a second woman will finally join Peggy Antonio up on the Melbourne Cricket Ground honours board – take a bow, Annabel Sutherland. The 23-year-old already had a Test double-hundred to her name, scored against South Africa last year: now, she will go down in history as the first woman to ever score a hundred at the G.

By the close, Australia had extended their lead to 252, with the real possibility that Beth Mooney – unbeaten on 98 – will join Sutherland up on that honours board by Saturday evening.

In this week’s newsletter: From the return of Apple’s hit thriller to the most open Oscar race I can remember, this year has so much in store for us culture vultures

Happy New Year! 2025 is upon us and pop-culturally it has the potential to be a belter, with big releases and events aplenty. For a full rundown of everything to watch, listen to and play this year, check out the Guardian arts desk’s exhaustive year-ahead preview.

Here on the Guide, meanwhile, we’re looking at some of the big questions across film, TV and music that we’re anticipating getting answers to this year. Just putting them together has whetted our appetites for the next 12 months. Hopefully they’ll do the same for you.

Donald Trump says tariffs will start at 25% and ‘may or may not’ rise over time

Here’s more on those comments from President Trump threatening to impose 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada, two of the US’ largest trading partners.

He said he was making the threat “for a number of reasons” but that he wants both countries to do more to secure their borders to reduce illegal migration and the flow of fentanyl into the US.

Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish’s The Struggle Against Terrorism revealed as some fear resurgence of fascism

A long-neglected 1930s mural in Mexico that warns about the rise of fascism has been revealed and restored – just as some historians say the world faces that threat once more.

The mural, which is titled The Struggle Against Terrorism, covers a 40ft wall in a colonial courtyard in Morelia, Michoacán, and depicts a history of persecution and resistance from biblical times to the modern day.

As Trump creates unprecedented chaos, Democrats have offered little more than platitudes – sparking comparisons to France’s collaborationist second world war regime

At the dawn of the second Trump presidency, defiance has given way to compliance.

While Donald Trump has rapidly and ruthlessly thrown the federal government into unprecedented chaos, the leaders of the Democratic party have offered up little more than limp banalities and platitudes. “Presidents come and presidents go. Through it all. God is still on the throne,” tweeted the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, at the end of Trump’s first week in office.

Trump’s vision of governance reminds me of nothing so much as the declaration attributed to Louis XIV: “L’Etat, c’est moi”: I am the state

The new Trump administration is busy. In a fury of executive orders, the restored president has frozen hiring at the federal government, cut off large amounts of science and research funding, ended or severely curtailed international programs in women’s health and HIV treatment, attempted to unilaterally amend the constitution to deny citizenship to hundreds of thousands, cut off aid to Ukraine, provoked a diplomatic spat with Colombia, and renamed the Gulf of Mexico in official documents as “the Gulf of America.”

Many of these moves are stunts and distractions, meant to appease Trump’s base of aggrieved culture warriors. Others are meant to further Trump’s personal power, and to make sure that no obstacles will be presented to his second term agenda of malice, retribution, and corrupt self-dealing.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Trade unions write to home secretary to complain about officers’ behaviour and tactics in London on 18 January

The Met police is facing growing questions over its handling of a pro-Palestine protest in central London at which more than 70 people were arrested.

On Friday, trade union leaders became the latest group to write to the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, demanding an independent inquiry into “repressive and heavy-handed policing” at the 18 January demonstration.

If, like me, you store seeds for future planting, it’s worth checking they will germinate. Luckily, the process is simple

I like to think of myself as an organised person, but if you met my seed box, you may disagree. It’s a recycled shoe box that once housed wellies, with cardboard dividing it into compartments labelled by plant family. Each section is a chaos of packets, envelopes, little jars and paper folded around seeds that have been bought, shared and saved. Not everything is labelled, some packets are empty and many of the seeds have been hanging around for too many years to still be fertile.

Seeds don’t last for ever, unfortunately. Their viability varies depending on how long they have been stored, the conditions they have been stored in and the type of seed – onion seeds, for example, are best sown within a year or two, whereas cucumber and kale seeds can be stored for about five years.  Generally speaking, a seed will last longer when it is kept in the opposite conditions to those required for germination. For most seeds, this means keeping them cool and dry.

• 2023 world champion lost in first round of World Masters
• Smith to see specialist over arthritis in right hand

Former world champion Michael Smith has revealed he is suffering from arthritis in his right hand and is set to see a specialist.

Smith’s form has dropped off rapidly since winning the world title in 2023 in what was widely regarded as producing one of the greatest legs in the history of the sport. He made the revelation on his injury after losing in the first round of the revamped World Masters on Thursday night.

Low pressure strengthens to tropical cyclone status in Indian Ocean, while European windstorm season rages on

A compact and stationary area of low pressure brought a sustained period of heavy rain to southern parts of Madagascar this week, with weather stations at Taolagnaro and Toliara recording five-day rainfall totals of 178mm and 196mm respectively, with a peak 24-hour total of 93mm at Toliara.

This area of low pressure strengthened to tropical cyclone status on Tuesday and was given the name Elvis. Although southern Madagascar experienced gusty winds owing to the storm, Elvis’s primary impacts on land were the result of the persistent rainfall. As of 9am on Thursday, Elvis contained maximum sustained winds of 40 knots and was tracking south-south-east, with no further effects on land expected before the storm undergoes extratropical transition by Sunday.

I remembered anxiously waiting for a reply, the disappointment when it never came – and all the adventures I went on after that letdown

I’ve always been a daredevil, but fear completely lost its grip on me when I was 15. A ­horseback riding accident resulted in severe injuries, the death of my beloved horse Spooks and the devastating news I’d never ride again. I was set on proving the doctors wrong. Just a few months later, with my mother’s support, I rode sidesaddle to win my first jumping competition. The thrill was incredible.

From then on, I dedicated my life to adventure, remembering my mother’s lesson: never say, “I can’t”. At 22, I read about an opening to be a motorcycle stunt rider – I’d learned to ride a few years earlier. Still, it was 1976 and I knew they were unlikely to hire a woman.

Until recently, everyone’s children were waving from the proverbial balcony on social media. You know the tide has turned when even the royals have stopped

Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but when I saw the photo of Princess Beatrice’s new baby, I laughed. Hear me out, though, before you decide I’m a horrible person: I expect baby Athena – lovely name – is perfectly lovely, and having arrived early, as my son did, will have quite a lot of feeding and growing to be getting on with. I say I “expect” she is, because we don’t actually know what Athena looks like. In the photograph her parents released of her, her entire face is hidden by her own raised sleeve in a Garbo-esque plea of “I want to be alone”.

So yes, I did laugh, but I also thought, well, fair play. I’m not one of those members of the British public who feels entitled to information about the royals, or photographs of their offspring. Athena is, as far as I’m concerned, entitled to her privacy and good on her parents for trying to maintain that, because, after all, she is too small to give her own consent.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist

It’s bizarre that a game featuring Hitler and Mussolini on their rise to power feels comforting, but here at least it is entirely permitted – indeed encouraged – to beat up Nazis

I have played many games that have great openings. Final Fantasy VII puts you in the middle of a raid. Mass Effect 2 introduces you to a world, then immediately destroys it. Sonic the Hedgehog bombards you with impossibly fast objects hurtling through a world of colourful danger.

I have never played a game in my life that starts by telling you not to be a Nazi. But that’s what greeted me when I played Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Before a single artefact was raided, before a whip was cracked, before you even see lead actor Troy Baker doing his best Harrison Ford impression in next generation graphics (amazing!), comes this warning:

The Irish author on Enid Blyton at bedtimes, discovering Dickens, and the brilliance of Edna O’Brien

My earliest reading memory
I am sitting at the kitchen table at home in Dublin. I am home from school. I am in short pants; my legs dangle. The book in front of me is called Step By Step. It has no author. On the amber paper cover, in my mother’s handwriting, is my name. It is my first spelling book. I still have it. It begins with easy ones, No, Go, So, and works through 20 pages to Deck, Dock, Duck. Everything that follows begins here. When you know your spellings, it is a triumphant moment. You have been given a key.

My favourite book growing up
My hunger for books allowed no time for a favourite. I was on to the next one. All of Enid Blyton might be one multi-volumed book in my memory. The Famous Five and The Secret Seven and the Mystery series all passing through my hands in bedtime reading, to be replaced later by westerns, especially those of Louis L’Amour, whose great virtue was the supply would never run out, because he wrote so many.

Residents near Tokyo question slow pace of effort to rescue 74-year-old as workers race to build 30-metre ramp

Fears are growing for a truck driver who has spent three days trapped inside a sinkhole in Japan, as rescue workers started building a ramp in a desperate attempt to reach him.

The 74-year-old, who has not been named, became trapped when the sinkhole opened up in a road near Tokyo on Tuesday, swallowing him and his two-tonne truck.

There are narrow parameters to this Ethan Hawke-narrated documentary – the conflict’s effects on the US. But it’s a valuable reflection packed with emotional, moving tales from penitent soldiers whose lives were torn apart

For the US and its allies, postwar foreign policy conforms to a pattern. In the planning and execution stages, this new war is strategically essential and a moral imperative, and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor; decades on, when it’s too late, it’s admitted that the same war was a folly or perhaps even a crime. Usually, though, the war was bad because of what it did to the US, not what it did to the other nations involved.

The six-part documentary series Vietnam: The War That Changed America sticks to that brief. There are a handful of Vietnamese interviewees, and the extent of the carnage wrought upon the country’s people is touched upon, but the subject matter is the effect the war had on the psyches of US soldiers – and on the mindset of the US itself. This does not, however, make the enterprise worthless. Accept those narrow parameters and the stories it tells are powerful, often stunningly, movingly so. Maybe it’s indictment enough.

Vietnam: The War That Changed America is on Apple TV+.

The Crown actor and Kate Fleetwood will join Ewan McGregor in Lila Raicek’s My Master Builder, inspired by Ibsen

Australian actor Elizabeth Debicki, best known for playing Diana, Princess of Wales in The Crown, is to return to London theatre this summer.

Debicki, whose last London role was in the thriller The Red Barn at the National Theatre in 2016, will star in American playwright Lila Raicek’s My Master Builder. It was announced last month that Ewan McGregor will play the lead role of an architect in the play. On Friday it was announced that Debicki has been cast as the architect’s former student, whose arrival disrupts a Hamptons house party thrown by his wife, who will be played by Kate Fleetwood.

Kemi Badenoch issues rebuke to Priti Patel after former home secretary defends rise in migration since Brexit

Since only around one person in 10 thinks Brexit has been a success, it is worth recording why the Conservative party says the fifth anniversary is worth celebrating. This is what the party said in the press notice sent out yesterday afternoon by Priti Patel. (See 9.23am.)

Five years ago today, Boris Johnson and the Conservative party delivered on the results of the Brexit referendum and secured our departure from the European Union – delivering on the clear democratic will of the country.

Since then, our country – standing on its own two feet as a sovereign nation – has been able to achieve so much.

Palestinian militant group says Ofer Calderon, Keith Siegel and Yarden Bibas will be freed as part of ceasefire deal

Yarden Bibas, one of the hostages announced to be released by Hamas on Saturday, was taken on 7 October, with his wife, Shiri Babas, and their two sons, four-year-old Ariel and 10-month-old Kfir - the youngest hostage taken that day.

Yarden is believed to be the only family member still alive.

Live, rolling coverage of business, economics and financial markets as US president said he would impose first tariffs of new administration on 1 February

Donald Trump’s White House will invoke emergency powers to introduce tariffs on Canada and Mexico, Reuters reports:

Two sources familiar with the matter said that Trump was expected to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as the legal basis for the tariffs, declaring a national emergency over fentanyl overdoses that killed nearly 75,000 Americans in 2023 and illegal immigration.

The statute enacted in 1977 and modified after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 gives the president broad powers to impose economic sanctions in a crisis.

Bundestag set to review Influx Limitation Act, which looks to tighten rules in existing laws on residence as Friedrich Merz grapples with rise of far right

in Berlin

The Bundestag debate has been delayed for half an hour on request of the CDU, thought to be to do with misgivings within the party over the debate, not least due to large numbers of protesters outside the CDU headquarters in Berlin.

• Rashford has rejected teams including Tottenham
• Manchester United keen on Mathys Tel as replacement

Marcus Rashford has his heart set on a loan move to Barcelona before Monday’s transfer deadline but a deal will go through only if the Catalan club can offload up to two players.

Rashford has rejected offers from several other clubs including Tottenham because of his determination to join Barcelona. Under La Liga’s squad cost limit rules Barcelona will have to generate funds to be able to spend the money required to sign Rashford from Manchester United. They are prepared in principle to cover most or all of Rashford’s £375,000-a-week salary.