After Beijing reshaped the political order in Hong Kong in its image, the fire has become a test of how well that new system can govern in a crisis.

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The Trump administration has been trying to repair the damage from the detention of hundreds of South Koreans in an immigration raid in Georgia.

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We checked price trackers to confirm this lowest-of-the-year deal on the fitness tech.

The South African government is investigating how more than a dozen men unwittingly ended up on the front line in Russia’s war on Ukraine.

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Malaysia launched a “year of enforcement” in response to a surge in undocumented migrants, many of them from Myanmar. Some faced nightmarish fates.

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Washington’s Putin-appeasing plan for peace in Ukraine has failed, but many heard death knell sounded for European reliance on US protection

Kaja Kallas, the European Union foreign policy chief, asked her officials this week to dig up the number of times Russia had – in its various guises – invaded other states in the 20th and 21st centuries. The answer that came back was 19 states, on 33 occasions. Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister, was not just indulging in some form of historical mathematics. She was seeking to make a point that lies at the heart of the dispute between the US and Europe over Ukraine’s future, a dispute that has again revealed the chasm across the Atlantic about the true nature of the Russian regime.

Kallas reads history books as a leisure activity and – drawing on her own country’s history of Soviet occupation – has long maintained that the Soviet Union fell, but its imperialism never did. “Russia has never truly had to come to terms with its brutal past or bear the consequences of its actions,” she has said, arguing that the nature of the Russian regime means “rewarding aggression will bring more war, not less”: Putin will come back for more.

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© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

She made a short, and much-ridiculed, trip to space. She tried to buy a house and fell foul of public opinion. And she’s found love, apparently, with Justin Trudeau. Time to get up to speed before this singer next hits the headlines

Do you ever feel like a plastic bag, drifting through the wind, wanting to start again? No? Just Katy Perry then. Seven months since her sense-defying jaunt into space, life on planet Earth hasn’t let up for the embattled hitmaker. She’s back in the headlines this week, implied to be raiding the pockets of a “disabled veteran” while facing scrutiny for her somewhat inexplicable new romance with Justin Trudeau. Yes, that Justin Trudeau. Shall we?

1. Perry wins in court, but loses online
By one metric, such as “relative to the rest of 2025”, this might have been a good week for Katy Perry. Since 2020, she has been embroiled in a legal battle against Carl Westcott, who sold her an eight-bedroom, 11-bathroom mansion in Montecito for $15m. Westcott then attempted to renege on the deal, claiming to have been incapacitated by painkillers (prescribed after a back operation) when signing the paperwork. A judge ruled in Perry’s favour in May last year, finding that Westcott was sound of mind when the sale went through. This week, another judge ruled that Perry was owed $1.8m in damages. This sounds like a win, you might think – except Perry had pushed for Westcott to pay $4.7m, and it’s been widely written up as Perry money-grubbing from an “85-year-old disabled veteran”. To give military.com’s headline, from earlier in the dispute in 2023: “Katy Perry Is Fighting a Dying, Elderly Veteran to Force Him to Sell His Home.” It is true that Westcott served in the 101st Airborne Division, is 85 years old and seriously ill with incurable Huntington’s disease. But the insistent framing may say more about Perry’s unenviable position as pop culture’s preferred punching bag.

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© Composite: Guardian Design; Blue Origin

© Composite: Guardian Design; Blue Origin

© Composite: Guardian Design; Blue Origin

Police reported at least three victims of gunshot wounds were transferred from Valley Fair Mall in San Jose on Black Friday as shoppers barricaded themselves in stores.

Gold Star father blames Biden administration for D.C. shooting by Afghan national, citing inadequate vetting during failed 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal.

Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades is raising questions about corruption and negligence in the renovations of the apartment complex where at least 128 people died

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Rescue workers in Indonesia are struggling to reach victims in several devastated areas that were hit by an earthquake and tsunami, and authorities fear the confirmed death toll of 248 will rise further

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Walmart Black Friday 2025 is here! No black eyes or bruised egos needed this year. Shop online now.

Police in California evacuated a shopping mall on one of the busiest shopping days of the year after a shooting left two people with gunshot wounds

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