Insurance practices in an age of climate volatility raise troubling questions about home ownership and housing affordability – the bedrock of the American middle class

For a few frenetic days last January, after losing their midcentury ranch home to the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles, Jessica and Matt Conkle thought they could see a glimmer of hope.

Their insurance company, State Farm, had sent emergency response teams to Altadena, where they lived, and they filed a claim right away. It wasn’t long before they received a check that covered four months of living expenses.

More than 800 employees sign petition calling for withdrawal of ICE agents and cancellation of contracts

More than 800 US tech workers have signed a petition calling for tech CEOs to demand the Trump administration remove US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from US cities and cancel contracts with the agency.

“We know our industry leaders have leverage: in October, they persuaded Trump to call off a planned ICE surge in San Francisco,” the petition reads. “Now they need to go further, and join us in demanding ICE out of all of our cities.”

Truly, I am the country’s biggest fan. But in the spirit of free speech its leaders apparently love, here’s a few things the rest of the world needs them to know

We in the rest of the world have had to hear a lot – such a lot – about what this US government and its hardcore fanbase thinks about us. So you know they’ll be super-relaxed and free-speechy about hearing some thoughts about how they look from the outside. Let’s use last Saturday as a single snapshot. In Minneapolis, they had the shooting by ICE agents of a protesting nurse who posed no threat – an event promptly, provably and blatantly lied about at the highest level by Donald Trump’s politburo. Then that evening in Washington, a lot of those same politburocrats turned out for the White House premiere of a ridiculous propaganda film about the president’s wife, also attended fawningly by bloodless Apple oligarch Tim Cook. And he’s not even the oligarch who paid an insane amount for the film. Top line, guys: all this makes you look like what your president likes to call a “shithole country”. Sorry! I assume it’s fine to use officially licensed vocabulary?

Obviously, it’s not a proper shithole country until the soft-skinned puppetmasters in the presidential palace cut some grizzled local warlord off at the knees for following orders, so it’s good to learn overnight that border patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino has been pulled out of Minneapolis, possibly locked out of his social media accounts, and may soon “retire”, presumably a fall guy for the likes of stage 4 homeland security tumour Stephen Miller. Bovino’s the guy who’s literally got the same haircut and outfit as the Sean Penn character in One Battle After Another. But hey, at least he wears a uniform. Again, what are international outsiders to make of the spectacle of ICE’s federal officers coming masked and frequently dressed in civilian clothes, while images from protests across the States show resisting civilians increasingly drawn to military-style clothing? Can Trump’s storm detachment not at least be issued with matching shirts? They don’t have to be brown, but Maga chic desperately needs to make even a first step to getting itself together. In the entire history of the movement, only one follower – the QAnon shaman – has ever had true style.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Paul Thomas Anderson’s antifa parable is queasily relevant to the times, but here’s hoping Tim Key and co can get some reward for their brilliant British film

• Combat intensifies as One Battle After Another takes 14 Bafta nominations
• Bafta film awards 2026: full list of nominations

The Bafta nominations list underscores the enormous award-season love being felt for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, his subversive vampire riff on America’s black experience – though it isn’t making history in quite the same way as it is at the Oscars, having 13 Bafta nominations, one behind Paul Thomas Anderson’s league-leader One Battle After Another with 14.

The awards-season prominence of Anderson’s epic antifa parable, inspired by the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland, with Leonardo DiCaprio as a dishevelled, clueless ex-revolutionary facing off against Sean Penn’s brutal honcho Colonel Lockjaw, is happening at a queasily appropriate zeitgeist moment. The grotesquely trigger-happy immigration officers of ICE are shooting people dead on US streets and this ugly fiasco is giving us a horribly familiar-looking new figure.

Hollywood Chamber of Commerce says it did not approve a promotional stunt linked to the actor, after lingerie was draped over the landmark’s letters

The Housemaid star Sydney Sweeney has been reprimanded by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce for a promotional stunt that involved draping bras over the celebrated Hollywood sign in Los Angeles.

Sweeney posted footage on social media of her and a group of people climbing up to the sign which is situated on Mount Lee, in the Hollywood Hills area of the city, and hanging dozens of strung-together bras over the sign’s 50ft-tall letters.

The internet has enabled a golden age of techno-vanity. But hating your looks is a time-honored tradition

Take a second before you read this to look in the mirror. Go on, it’ll be worth it. I’ll be here when you get back.

OK, how’d that go? Did you like what you saw? Probably not. Feeling a bit puffy? See a zit in a conspicuous area? Did you want to punch yourself for the sin of experiencing the natural course of aging? These feelings are normal. Being disappointed in how you look is a time-honored tradition; it’s just that now, we have the means to fix all that. GLP-1s mean you can lose weight quickly, without doing much more than shoving a needle in your bum a few times a month. Plastic surgery, Botox, fillers, Turkish hair plugs. We live in the golden age of techno-vanity, where “self-improvement” can be had for a few bucks (and days and days of living in bandages like a hipster mummy). The odious trend of “looksmaxxing” is the natural nadir of our collective obsession with not being ugly.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

As the budding restaurateurs suffer 17th-century flashbacks, Jamie Campbell Bower – AKA Vecna in Stranger Things – saves director Chuck Russell’s remake from cheesy oblivion

Jamie Campbell Bower gave the standout performance as the big bad in the otherwise ho-hum fourth season of Stranger Things, and in this tawdry but fun occult-themed thriller, like Satan himself, he’s back to his same old scene-stealing tricks. Once again, he’s not the protagonist but a sinister figure first met literally in the shadows, making ominous pronouncements in that posh-boy accent. When finally revealed, he is dipping his chin and looking up with those uncannily blue eyes like a vogue dancer catching the spotlight. If he keeps at it with roles like this, he could be the Peter Cushing of modern horror, but with catwalk-queen hair, or the goth equivalent of the young Ralph Fiennes in his rent-a-villain era. What’s not to love?

When Campbell Bower’s creepy antiquities expert Alexander Babtiste isn’t around, though, Witchboard reverts to its cheap and doleful resting form, in which B- and C-list actors play doltish young people bewitched by a proto-Ouija board that summons the spirit of a 17th-century French witch (Antonia Desplat). Somehow, the board has found its way to today’s New Orleans, where main girl Emily (Madison Iseman) finds it in the forest while foraging for mushrooms with her hipster-chef boyfriend Christian (Aaron Dominguez). At the urging of Christian’s slinky ex-girlfriend, Brooke (Mel Jarnson), who crashes their party, Emily tries out the board, and is soon having flashbacks to a life she never lived.

Mother whose visa application was pending says she will send girl back to US soon accompanied by another relative

Five-year-old Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos misses her cousins, classmates and kindergarten teachers in Austin, Texas. Despite being a US citizen, she was deported on 11 January alongside her mother, Karen Guadalupe Gutiérrez Castellanos, to Honduras, a country Génesis had never known.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were acting on an administrative deportation order against Gutiérrez, 26, issued in 2019, before Génesis was born.

Experts are watching for how other countries will react as the ‘real economy’ shifts to cheaper, cleaner energy

The United States has officially exited the Paris climate agreement for the second time, cementing Donald Trump’s renewed break with the primary global venue to address global heating.

The move leaves the US as the only country to have withdrawn from the pact, placing it alongside Iran, Libya and Yemen as the only countries not party to the agreement. While it will not halt global climate efforts, experts say it could significantly complicate them.

Now the US is vying regional dominance, experts point to War Plan Red as proof its Canadian allyship has always been flimsy

First, American forces would strike with poison gas munitions, seizing a strategically valuable port city. Soldiers would sever undersea cables, destroy bridges and rail lines to paralyze infrastructure. Major cities on the shores of lakes and rivers would be captured in order to blunt any civilian resistance.

The multipronged invasion would rely on ground forces, amphibious landing and then mass internments. According to the architects of the plan, the attack would be short-lived and the besieged country would fall within days.

Leaders and voters who formerly applauded US president’s aims have been growing increasingly uneasy

Donald Trump’s attempted Greenland grab has driven a wedge between the US president and some of his ideological allies in Europe, as previously unstinting enthusiasm and admiration collides with one of the far right’s key tenets: national sovereignty.

Trump’s subsequent disparaging remark that Nato allies’ troops “stayed a little off the frontlines” while fighting with US forces in Afghanistan has only deepened the divide, piquing far-right patriotic sentiments and prompting an avalanche of criticism.