Food and Drug Administration’s approval hands drugmaker Novo Nordisk an edge in the race to market an obesity pill

US regulators on Monday gave the green light to a pill version of the blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy, the first daily oral medication to treat obesity.

The US Food and Drug Administration’s approval handed drugmaker Novo Nordisk an edge over rival Eli Lilly in the race to market an obesity pill. Lilly’s oral drug, orforglipron, is still under review.

Not everyone understands the spirit of Christmas

• See more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here

Church leaders and members detained as government tightens controls on underground Christian gatherings

The knocks came at 2am. Hiding out at a friend’s house in a Beijing suburb, Gao Yingjia and his wife, Geng Pengpeng, rushed downstairs to meet the group of plain-clothed men who said they were police officers. Their son, nearly six, was sleeping upstairs, and Gao and Geng wanted to minimise the ruckus. They knew their time was up.

Two months later, Gao is in a detention centre in Guangxi province, southern China, charged with “illegal use of information networks”. His arrest was part of the biggest crackdown on Christians in China since 2018. It has prompted alarm from the US government and human rights groups, with some analysts describing it as the death knell for unofficial churches in China.

Move comes as union representing US diplomats said it was ‘deeply concerned’ by the process, which could ‘politicise’ foreign service

The Trump administration has quietly recalled nearly 30 ambassadors and other senior overseas diplomats as the Trump administration plans to promote appointees loyal to the new administration to higher levels of the state department, according to diplomatic sources.

The recall of the ambassadors or heads of mission, which were confirmed by several current and former senior diplomats, was unusual for targeting career foreign service officers heading embassies overseas who are generally left in place after a change in administration because they strive to be apolitical.

President says the ships will be bigger, faster and a hundred times more powerful than any previous US-built warship

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. Donald Trump has announced plans for the US navy to build a new generation of warships – known as “Trump-class”.

The ships will be bigger, faster and a hundred times more powerful than any previous US-built warship, the president said on Monday. The project will begin with construction of two such battleships and eventually be expanded to 20 to 25 new vessels.

Move to bring back customary marine rights is celebrated, but concerns remain about potential effect on tourism and lack of clarity about how it might work

In Fiji, babies know a connection to the sea from birth; their umbilical cords, or vicovico, are sometimes implanted in the reefs that frame the coastal Pacific nation, embedded among the coral. It’s an age-old practice among iTaukei, the Indigenous Fijian people – creating a lifeline to the ocean, a reminder of their roles as traditional custodians.

Yet for decades, controversy over the rights to the Fijian seabed has cast a long cloud over the island nation, which sees a million tourists flock to its shores each year, many to surf the perfect, barrelling reef breaks. It has led to heartache and, at times, violence.

As a public health expert and Jewish Australian, I urge our leaders to ensure gun legislation matches the world we live in

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After the awful attack at Bondi, Australia is facing several reckonings. There’s a long-overdue national focus on antisemitism, something that the Jewish community has been worried about as long as I have been alive. There’s the ongoing concern about national security, and questions about how something like this could have happened. But to me, as a public health expert and Jewish Australian, perhaps the most important conversation we are finally having is the one about guns.

Public health experts have been warning about guns for at least a decade. In the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, Australians came together and implemented a suite of measures to curb gun violence across the country. And it worked. Prior to 1996, we saw about one mass shooting a year. In the decades since, we have seen vanishingly few major events, and none with a death toll anywhere close to the shootings of the 80s and 90s.

• Metcalf suspended two games without pay

• NFL cites policy barring player-fan confrontations

• Fan denies using racial slur through lawyers

Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver DK Metcalf has been suspended by the NFL for two games without pay over his altercation with a Detroit Lions fan on Sunday.

The league said Metcalf’s actions violate league policy, which specifies that “players may not enter the stands or otherwise confront fans at any time on game day and … if a player makes unnecessary physical contact with a fan in any way that constitutes unsportsmanlike conduct or presents crowd-control issues and/or risk of injury, he will be held accountable.”

• Egypt 2 (Marmoush 64, Salah 90+1) Zimabwe 1 (Dube 20)

• Record Afcon winners recover to win in Agadir

There were no apologies from Mohamed Salah to his teammates in red on Monday night, with Egypt’s players grateful to Liverpool’s troubled superstar for conjuring a stoppage-time winner.

After failing to capitalise on a dominant start, the seven-times Afcon winners required a stunning equaliser from Manchester City’s Omar Marmoush and Salah’s late winner to spare their blushes against the aptly named Warriors from Zimbabwe, who have never progressed beyond the group stages.

The one moment of true quality came when Raúl Jiménez stood 12 yards from goal and looked at John Victor. It was a battle of wits but there was only going to be one winner. Jiménez stuttered, moved towards the ball at a leisurely pace, waited for Nottingham Forest’s goalkeeper to move left and then set Fulham on the path to a vital victory by sending a clinical penalty into the opposite corner.

This was Jiménez in his element. The Mexican is not the quickest striker around but the 34-year-old is still one of the game’s sharpest thinkers. Few, after all, can match Jiménez for accuracy from the spot. He is calmness personified in those situations and, remarkably, is now joint top with Yaya Touré when it comes to players with a 100% conversion rate from penalty kicks in the history of the Premier League.

She’s such a great interviewer that this chat with Kenneth Branagh feels like it deserves an entire series. It’s relentlessly charming – and hugely moving when they talk about Dame Judi’s late husband

Cast your mind back to Christmas 2017, and you might remember a slightly wacky BBC documentary called Dame Judi Dench: My Passion for Trees. On the surface, it seemed like one of those god-awful shows put together by tombola; matching a celebrity with a random subject and hoping it would pass muster.

However, this was not the case. Dame Judi Dench, it turned out, really did have a passion for trees. An obsessive passion, one that manifested itself in a small woodland where she named trees after friends of hers who had died. The result was unexpectedly tender and gorgeous, and the show ended up being the best thing on TV that Christmas.

• Chiefs to leave Arrowhead after nearly 60 years

• New domed Kansas stadium targeted for 2031

• Missouri efforts to retain team fall short

The Kansas City Chiefs announced Monday they will leave their longtime home at Arrowhead Stadium for a new, domed stadium that will be built across the Kansas-Missouri state line and be ready for the start of the 2031 season.

The announcement came shortly after a council of Kansas lawmakers voted unanimously inside a packed room at the state Capitol to allow for STAR bonds to be issued to cover up to 70% of the cost of the stadium and accompanying mixed-use district.

Game developer, who was also involved in Medal of Honor and Titanfall, was killed in a car crash

Vince Zampella, the co-creator of the Call of Duty video game series, has died aged 55.

The head of the video game developer Respawn Entertainment and the co-founder of Infinity Ward was killed in a car crash in California, NBC Los Angeles reported.

• Record signing injured while scoring at Tottenham

• Swedish striker had surgery after scan on Monday

Liverpool’s record signing, Alexander Isak, is facing several months on the sidelines after undergoing surgery on an ankle injury that included a fractured fibula.

Isak sustained the injury as a result of a heavy challenge from Micky van de Ven while in the process of scoring in Liverpool’s 2-1 win against Tottenham on Saturday. The 26-year-old was helped off in considerable pain and MRI scans confirmed Liverpool’s initial fears of a serious problem.

Coach couldn’t free up his players so they found another way of removing pressure – by losing the series in rapid time

Finally, in the last two days of the third Test with the series already basically lost, England stood up. They have been on a hell of a journey over 11 days of Test cricket, and now – too late – they are getting somewhere.

They have reminded me of some of the students who have passed through the school where I teach: they get into the upper sixths and they’re first-team cricketers, the big boys, very confident, dominating the team, playing good cricket, think they’ve cracked the code. Then they have a gap year and go travelling, and suddenly they realise there’s a whole world out there, that life can be tough and things can be done differently. Out of their comfort zone they can mature rapidly as young men and as people. I look at England’s performance in the third Test and think that after some tough experiences, and having been forced to confront the fact that they are not what they thought they were, they have maybe turned a corner in terms of their maturity.

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Fulham manager Marco Silva talks to Sky Sports. “The team reacted well [against Newcastle in the Carabao Cup] … a tough place to go … we were very competitive again … we fought until the last minutes … a better first half than the second … it was tough to take the result … but there were positives … our identity … some good individual performances … we just want to be more consistent throughout the game.”

A win tonight would be huge for both teams. Neither Fulham nor Forest are in trouble at the moment … but they’re trouble-adjacent, and three points would make their Christmas morning eggnog taste that much sweeter. Victory tonight springs Fulham feasibly as high as 11th, though they’d need to give Forest a four-goal battering to get there. But any victory would take them above Spurs, while a two-goal win sees them leapfrog Brentford as well, and that would surely be more than satisfactory in warming their capital cockles. Meanwhile Forest can only get as high as 15th with a win, but that’d put them ahead of Fulham, and more importantly eight points clear of the relegation zone.

An atmospheric river is forecast to drive storms across the state this week, bringing rain, high winds and risk of floods

One person has died in California amid heavy flooding, as residents across the state brace for a week of brutal storms that are predicted to bring extensive rainfall throughout the Christmas weekend.

Authorities in Redding, a city in northern California, reported that a motorist died on Sunday after becoming stranded in their vehicle.

The Danish postal service has announced it will cease deliveries from 30 December after 400 years. Eventually, other countries may go down a similar route

Predictions of the demise of letter writing are not new. The invention of the telegraph and the rise of the postcard were both seen as potential threats to a more leisurely, reflective form of communication. Yet by the close of the 20th century, more letters were being sent than ever, as social correspondence began to be supplemented by a boom in business mail.

From Europe’s most tech-savvy society, however, comes ominous news. As of next week, Denmark’s state-run postal service will end all letter deliveries after doing the rounds for 400 years. Around 1,500 jobs are being cut, and the country’s beloved red letterboxes are being sold off. It will still be possible for Danes to send a card or a love letter to someone far away next Christmas, but only via the shops of a smaller private company or a costly home collection.

The late musician bristled against his record companies, his producers and fame itself – but that friction ignited both his AOR hits and his raw, spirited take on the blues

• Chris Rea, rock and blues singer-songwriter, dies aged 74
• Gallery: a life in pictures
• Comment: Driving Home for Christmas captures the season’s true spirit

For an artist best-known for a string of slickly commercial adult-oriented rock hits – Josephine, On the Beach, The Road to Hell, the Yuletide perennial Driving Home for Christmas – Chris Rea’s career was a rather more fraught business than you might have expected.

He had something of the splendidly grumpy refusenik about him. His debut single, Fool (If You Think It’s Over) was a transatlantic hit, earning him a best new artist Grammy nomination (he lost to Billy Joel, an artist the single had garnered comparisons to), but Rea announced that he “despised” the song: “It’s just not me.” He chafed at his record company’s expectations: his 1978 debut album, Whatever Happened to Benny Santini? got its title after his label suggested that he might consider adopting a stage name, and he later protested that the producers he worked with made his music too glossy and “smoothed-out”.

• Christmas-loving player’s run goes beyond 25 December

• No 7 seed Wade loses 3-2 in biggest upset so far

Ricky Evans gave himself a post-Christmas walk-on song dilemma by dumping the seventh seed, James Wade, out of the PDC world championship.

Evans missed seven match darts before winning the final set 6-4 in legs for a 3-2 second-round victory at Alexandra Palace. Four-time world championship semi-finalist Wade became the highest seed to depart this year’s tournament after missing his own match dart at double five when 4-3 ahead in the final set.

• NBA seeks investors for new Europe-wide men’s league

• Permanent franchises plus annual qualification pathway

• League aims to avoid clashes with domestic competitions

The NBA confirmed Monday that it would begin pursuing teams and ownership groups for a new professional European men’s league it hopes to launch in partnership with Fiba.

The prospective league would feature permanent teams and additional spots up for grabs via an annual qualification pathway. Clubs in Fiba-affiliated domestic leagues around Europe could qualify for the new league through the Basketball Champions League or an end-of-year tournament.

Black Diamond Pool eruption provides dramatic footage after being captured on official camera

A hot spring in Yellowstone national park that erupts sporadically was captured on an official camera exploding in spectacular muddy plumes at the weekend.

Volcanic experts at the US Geological Survey described the eruption as simply “Kablooey!”

The 82-year-old singer says the disease is in its early stages and he plans to be back on stage in February

Barry Manilow has revealed that he has been diagnosed with lung cancer and will undergo surgery.

The 82-year-old singer, whose parade of high-spirited hits from Copacabana to Mandy has made him one of pop music’s most beloved showmen, will have surgery to remove part of his lung in an effort to fight off the disease, which is in its early stages.

Artist confirms image in Bayswater is by him, but gives no indication about another outside Centre Point tower

A new Banksy mural that shows two children lying down and looking at the sky has appeared in west London.

The artist revealed he was behind the artwork above a row of garages on Queen’s Mews in Bayswater by posting a photo of it to his Instagram account on Monday afternoon.