The pristine copy of Superman No 1, the character’s first solo title from 1939, was discovered in an attic in California last year

A copy of Superman No 1 that was discovered in an attic in California last year has become the world’s most expensive comic book after selling for US$9.12m (£6.96m, A$14.14m).

Superman No 1 was published in 1939 and was the Man of Steel’s first solo title. It marked the first time a character that debuted in a comic book had their own title devoted entirely to them.

Great and good pay tribute in Washington but honouring of former vice-president was an exercise in omission

You suspected that Maga had not conquered the Washington national cathedral when Bill Kristol was spotted at a men’s urinal conversing with Chris Wallace. You knew it for sure when James Carville, Anthony Fauci and Rachel Maddow were seen sitting close to one another in the nave.

The funeral of the 46th US vice-president, Dick Cheney, who died earlier this month aged 84, was a throwback to a less raucous and rancorous time. Ex-presidents and vice-presidents, Democratic and Republican, made small talk, but Donald Trump, who spent Thursday crying treason and calling for Democrats to be put to death, and his deputy JD Vance were not invited.

The 1940 painting of Kahlo asleep in bed has surpassed the record set by the $44.4m sale of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 in 2014

A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.7m (£41.8m, A$84.7m) at a New York art auction, setting a new top sale price for a work by any female artist.

El sueño (La cama), or The Dream (The Bed), which depicts Kahlo asleep in a bed with a smiling skeleton wrapped in dynamite on the canopy above her, sold on Thursday night at a Sotheby’s auction of surrealist art after four minutes of bidding.

Prakazrel ‘Pras’ Michel was convicted in 2023 after a trial that included testimony from Leonardo DiCaprio and former US attorney general Jeff Sessions

The Grammy-winning rapper Prakazrel “Pras” Michel of the Fugees has been sentenced to 14 years in prison for involvement in a billion-dollar Malaysia scam that funnelled money into US politics.

The 52-year-old founding member of the 1990s hit trio the Fugees was convicted of money laundering and campaign finance violations in 2023 in a global foreign influence scandal led by the Malaysian financier Low Taek Jho.

Activist detained by ICE condemns ‘smear and harassment campaign’ and demands release of key communications

Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist who participated in protests at Columbia University and was detained by Ice earlier this year, has filed a lawsuit demanding the Trump administration release its communications with anti-Palestinian groups he says contributed to his March arrest and efforts to detain him.

The groups, a number of which have boasted about their involvement in sharing dossiers on Palestine activists with the administration, have claimed credit for Khalil’s arrest, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is part of the legal team representing Khalil, and they say there is evidence that indicates the Trump administration “acted on information and misinformation – provided by these groups in cracking down” on Khalil and other pro-Palestine activists.

Poverty rate jumped from 12.2% to 16.3% in 2023 in state, Tipping Point Community report finds

Newly released data found that the San Francisco Bay Area’s poverty rate soared from 12.2% to 16.3% in 2023, with an approximate total 1.02 million residents in this six-county region considered impoverished by year’s end.

Another 12.5% of residents – about 790,000 people – hovered on the brink of poverty, meaning that about three in 10 Bay Area residents struggled to cover basic expenses.

Oscar-nominated star of two-part musical forced to cancel press stops as film is predicted to deliver year’s biggest box office opening

Ariana Grande has tested positive for Covid amid the whirlwind press tour for Wicked: For Good, precluding some promotional appearances in New York.

The Grammy award winner and Oscar nominee posted an Instagram story on Thursday captioned “moments before Covid” along with a photo from her appearance on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon from earlier this week. Grande, who plays Galinda/Glinda in the second part of Jon M Chu’s film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, will reportedly miss a few upcoming press appearances, including a slot on The Kelly Clarkson Show.

US president roundly decried for Truth Social post after lawmakers told military personnel to refuse illegal orders

• US politics live – latest updates

Democrats expressed outrage after Donald Trump accused a group of Democratic lawmakers of engaging in “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH” and that they should be arrested after they posted a video in which they told active service members they should refuse illegal orders.

The video, released on Tuesday, features six Democratic lawmakers who have previously served in the military or in intelligence roles, including senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly, and representatives Maggie Goodlander, Chris Deluzio, Chrissy Houlahan and Jason Crow.

Senate majority leader, John Thune, and others push the attorney general to release Epstein records within 30 days

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Within hours of Donald Trump signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law, Republican senators were on the ground to issue a pointed message to the US attorney general, Pam Bondi: don’t bury these documents.

The bill’s passage marked a rare moment of bipartisan support in an otherwise ideologically fractured Congress as it now sets a 30-day deadline for the release of Department of Justice files related to the actions of convicted sex offender of minors and financier Jeffrey Epstein, dubbed by a judge “the most infamous pedophile in American history”.

Release of documents comes amid conjecture Trump may have authorized the agency to assassinate Venezuelan president

The White House under Gerald Ford tried to block a landmark Senate report that disclosed the CIA’s role in assassination attempts against foreign leaders and ultimately led to a radical overhaul in how the agency was held to account, documents released to mark the 50th anniversary of the report’s publication reveal.

The documents, dating from 1975, were posted on Thursday by the National Security Archive, an independent research group, as it sought to highlight the report’s significance amid conjecture that Donald Trump may have authorized the agency to assassinate Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, amid a massive US military build-up against the country.

Ukrainian president’s office issues statement after other officials condemn ‘absurd’ plan to end conflict

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he will negotiate with Donald Trump on a US-backed peace plan that called on Ukraine to make painful concessions in order to end the Kremlin’s invasion of his country.

The president’s office on Thursday confirmed he had received the draft peace plan, which was prepared by US and Russian officials, and that he would speak to Trump in the coming days about “existing diplomatic opportunities and the main points that are necessary for peace”.

Joe Biden and George W Bush attend Republican’s service, while Barack Obama and Bill Clinton are notable absentees

Donald Trump and JD Vance have been snubbed, by not being invited to former vice-president Dick Cheney’s funeral, taking place on Thursday, according to a White House official familiar with the matter.

Cheney, the former US vice-president to George W Bush and a Republican defense hawk who became a fierce critic of the current US president, died earlier this month at the age of 84.

• Hunt backs Turning Point USA’s rival half-time show

• Goodell stands firm despite Trump-driven backlash

Gracie Hunt, the daughter of Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, is throwing her support behind Turning Point USA’s plan to stage an alternative Super Bowl half-time show, a direct counter to the NFL’s decision to feature Bad Bunny at Super Bowl LX.

Hunt said in an appearance on Fox News Channel’s The Will Cain Show on Tuesday that she “most definitely” backs Turning Point’s counter-programming effort, spearheaded by Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk. The NFL’s choice of Bad Bunny for the half-time show has attracted strong pushback from many on the right, who object to his criticism of Donald Trump and US immigration enforcement.

Top Democrat on Senate banking committee says private funding for Trump’s ballroom poses serious corruption concerns

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Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has said that the next independent Department of Justice “should investigate” the private donations that have funded the construction of the new White House ballroom.

Warren – who is the top Democrat on the Senate banking committee – told the Guardian in a statement that the ballroom could be “a golden crime scene” and urged the next administration to “follow the money” to uncover “whether any crimes were committed” in its financing.

Launch of digitisation project marks 80th anniversary of start of legal effort to bring Nazi leaders to justice

A fully digitised collection of the records of the Nuremberg trials is being launched online to mark the 80th anniversary of the start of the groundbreaking legal effort to bring Nazi leaders to justice.

Open access to every official document from the trial, held by the Harvard law school library, will be available to all researchers, whether amateur or professional, for the first time from Thursday after a 25-year endeavour by a 30-strong team of historians, metadata curators and librarians.

The ‘2024 period piece’ stars the Grammy-winning musician with Kylie Jenner, Rachel Sennott and Alexander Skarsgård

Charli xcx’s 2026 big screen onslaught is set to kick off with The Moment, a mockumentary starring the musician as a self-described “hell version” of herself.

The film, based on an idea by the Grammy winner, is fiction but Charli has called it “the realest depiction of the music industry that I’ve ever seen”.

Brendan Carr, head of FCC, asks if programme ever aired in US which is seen as key to any future litigation

A US media regulator led by a close ally of Donald Trump is examining whether an edition of the BBC’s Panorama broke US regulations in the way it edited one of the president’s speeches.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), led by Brendan Carr, has written to the BBC’s outgoing director general, Tim Davie, asking whether the programme was ever aired in the US.

Alleged trafficker Zhi Dong Zhang escaped via a tunnel in Mexico before flying to Cuba and reportedly Russia but now finds himself on trial in a Brooklyn courtroom

• The China-Mexico fentanyl pipeline: increasingly sophisticated and deadly

Like so many great escapes, it involved a tunnel.

One night in July, in the Mexico City neighbourhood where he was under house arrest, Zhi Dong Zhang snuck through a hole into the property nextdoor and escaped from under the noses of the soldiers guarding him.

As federal agents descend in North Carolina, businesses close as even an after-school program is targeted

On Central Avenue in Charlotte, North Carolina, Manolo’s Bakery has become a focal point for resistance to the upscaled immigration raids since border patrol officers descended on the city at the weekend. The owner closed the bakery to prevent his staff from being targeted. Most of the other shops on Charlotte’s busy immigrant-centric street followed suit.

Dozens of people have taken up camp in the parking lot to wave signs of support for immigrants. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been active in the city for months as part of Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda but things went up a level when border patrol arrived. Agents swiftly began buzzing through the place to make an armed show of their presence, followed at times by Charlotteans honking their horns in warning.

As the veteran actor turns 100 he reveals that he was approached to play the British spy in the early 60s, but realised his accent wouldn’t have been up to scratch

For more than six decades, the actor Dick Van Dyke has been pilloried for his attempts at a British accent in Mary Poppins (1964). Now, the actor who has since apologised for the “most atrocious cockney accent in the history of cinema” as chimney sweep Bert in the Disney classic has revealed he was in the running to play another UK icon on screen: James Bond.

Speaking on the Today TV programme in the US, Van Dyke, who turns 100 next month, said that Bond producer Albert Broccoli approached him to ask if he fancied the role of the British spy in his first big screen outing.

Cyril Ramaphosa says US has had ‘change of mind’ but does not confirm Trump’s attendance in Johannesburg

The US has changed its mind about attending the G20 summit in Johannesburg, South Africa’s president has said, without confirming whether Donald Trump, who had said the US would boycott the event, now wanted to come.

Trump has claimed that South Africa racially discriminates against the minority white Afrikaner community, which led the country during the apartheid regime that ended in 1994.