Paul Thomas Anderson’s comedy thriller named best film by Gotham awards and New York Film Critics Circle

Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed comedy thriller One Battle After Another has emerged as an early best picture frontrunner as the awards season kicks off.

The Thomas Pynchon adaptation, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as an ex-revolutionary searching for his daughter, was named best feature at Monday’s Gotham awards. “I didn’t expect this, actually,” Anderson said on stage. “I started to think I didn’t know what was going on.”

As US-Venezuela tensions have long simmered, Trump’s alleged ultimatum may tip relations to boiling point

• Deadly airstrikes and a military buildup: how the US pressure campaign against Venezuela has unfolded in the Caribbean

Weeks of saber-rattling, dark threats and a US military buildup not seen in Latin America since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis led on 21 November, somewhat anticlimactically, to a telephone call, when Donald Trump rang the man he has cast as his arch-adversary, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.

By Trump’s own account, it was less an attempt at opening dialogue en route to a mutually beneficial compromise than a bid to up the ante by imparting an ultimatum.

Release of convicted cocaine trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández is latest US interference in election and comes despite Trump’s apparent ‘war on drugs’

• Analysis: Trump’s pardon of Honduras’s ex-president shows counter-drug effort is ‘based on lies and hypocrisy’

A former president of Honduras who was convicted of drug trafficking has walked free from a US prison after receiving a pardon from Donald Trump, as the country’s presidential election remained on a knife edge with the US-backed candidate leading by 515 votes.

Juan Orlando Hernández, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison for allegedly creating “a cocaine superhighway to the United States”, was released from a West Virginia prison after Trump’s intervention, Hernández’s wife confirmed on Tuesday.

Actor, who started working in commercials before making her first film at six, calls acting a job that was ‘chosen’ for her

Jodie Foster has spoken out about parents who encourage their children to act, saying she “know[s] how dangerous it is”.

Speaking at the Marrakesh film festival, Foster said that she “would never have chosen to be an actor, I don’t have the personality of an actor. I’m not somebody that wants to dance on a table and, you know, sing songs for people.”

The award-winning drama series has received a 4K restoration that has seen jumbled up episodes and a vomit machine goof

A recent 4K restoration of Mad Men has brought new fans to HBO Max – as well as technical headaches.

Bemused and bewildered fans of the groundbreaking television series, which ran from 2007 until 2015 on AMC, have spotted numerous errors after the supposedly sleek restoration began streaming on HBO Max, including several episodes out of order and one particularly glaring post-production goof.

Chief executive tells staff it is ‘critical time’ for chatbot as it faces intense competition from Google’s new Gemini 3

Sam Altman has declared a “code red” at OpenAI to improve ChatGPT as the chatbot faces intense competition from rivals.

According to a report by tech news site the Information, the chief executive of the San Francisco-based startup told staff in an internal memo: “We are at a critical time for ChatGPT.”

She’s far from the only celebrity to have declared her intention to live outside the US. As with many others though, it looks like a reverse ferret could be in the works

I’m not some sort of secret Reform voter, OK? As a Brit (albeit a Brit abroad), I’ve got no problem with rich immigrants coming to the UK and taking all our mansions. I just think they really ought to integrate and not bring their funny foreign ideas with them.

Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi, I’m talking to you. The California couple arrived in the UK last year, just before Donald Trump won the election. As soon as the votes were in, they declared they weren’t going back, and would stay on the saner side of the Atlantic. I’m not sure how the immigration logistics worked, but it seems “one in, one out” schemes don’t apply to people coming in on big jets, only small boats. The pair bought a fancy pad in the Cotswolds and DeGeneres buttered up the locals during a public appearance in July by declaring “Everything here is just better.”

Polluting facilities in Monterrey, which has close ties to the US, are pumping toxic heavy metals into the city’s air and threatening residents’ health

• Leer en español en Quinto Elemento Lab

An industrial boom in a US manufacturing hub in Mexico is contributing to a massive air pollution crisis that is threatening residents’ health, according to new research by the Guardian and Quinto Elemento Lab.

The polluting facilities in Monterrey include factories that are operated by companies from around the world – including the US, Europe, Asia and Mexico – but export largely to the US.

Approval of legislation to ban Pfas would be major win for advocates pushing for safer gear alternatives across US

A new bill proposed in the New York city council would ban the use of toxic Pfas “forever chemicals” in protective gear worn by the city’s 11,000 firefighters.

The New York fire department is the nation’s largest firefighting force, and approval of the legislation would mark a major win for advocates who are pushing for safer “turnout gear” alternatives across the US. Massachusetts and Connecticut last year became the first states to ban the use of Pfas in turnout gear, and Illinois enacted a ban this year.

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.

Kremlin aide says Ukraine crisis is no closer to resolution after Witkoff talks, as Russian president accuses European powers of sabotaging peace

Russia and the US did not make progress toward a peace deal for Ukraine during their talks, a senior aide to Vladimir Putin has said, hours after the Russian president issued threats that Russia was ready for war with Europe.

In remarks to Russian media, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said that after a five-hour meeting with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the two sides were “neither further nor closer to resolving the crisis in Ukraine. There is a lot of work to be done.”

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

Shaped by lockdown and two Trump presidencies, gen Z are grappling with a lot in love, dating and the bedroom

The sex lives of gen Z are of great interest – to politicians, to parents, to influencers and dating app executives and to you, apparently. Are gen Z so lonely they are falling in love with AI robots? Are they forming polycules across the US? Are they having enough sex? Are they having sex at all?

Gen Z is defined roughly as young Americans aged 13 to 28. This generation came of age with information about sex readily available to them, for better (the internet provides both sex education and community) and arguably for worse, too (in 2022, 54% of US teens reported first seeing online pornography at age 13 or younger). They are more likely to embrace non-traditional identities and are progressive on issues such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage – especially gen Z women.