There are many excuses for failing to tax the ultra-wealthy. The truth is that governments don’t tackle the problem because they don’t want to

There is one political problem from which all others follow. It is the major cause of Donald Trump, of Nigel Farage, of the shocking weakness of their opponents, of the polarisation tearing societies apart, of the devastation of the living world. It is simply stated: the extreme wealth of a small number of people.

It can also be quantified. The World Inequality Report (WIR) 2026 shows that about 56,000 people – 0.001% of the global population – corral three times more wealth than the poorest half of humanity. They afflict almost every country. In the UK, for example, 50 families hold more wealth than 50% of the population combined.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

No one wants to visit us any more – but they might pay $50,000 for a bag you could get here for $3

There aren’t many escapes from the grim onslaught of terrible news these days. You can stare at a blank wall, obsessively count the hairs on your arm, or, in a true moment of desperation, ponder the state of global fashion. I prefer the last one. I love being on the cutting edge of style, peacocking out in the decaying slopfest that is our planet. A crisp, well-made suit is a cure for all manner of emotionally trying times. I relish being hyper-aware of the goings-on of fashion, so I was one of the first sorry souls to learn of the current global obsession with flimsy canvas Trader Joe’s shopping bags.

For those unaware, Trader Joe’s is an American grocery store chain known primarily for its affordable prices, whimsical tropical branding, and heart-attack-inducing parking lots – apparently designed to be small because the stores themselves are so tiny that they can’t justify more spaces. I don’t naturally see the use in swanning about with a tote bag promoting a demolition derby disguised as a market, but I’m not most people.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

She was a star at 14, learned how to act with the whole world watching, then stepped away to discover herself. Now she’s back in the new Tomb Raider – and a Die Hard-style thriller

Sophie Turner has a screwball comedy vibe in real life – elegant trouser suit, arch but friendly expression, perfect hair, she looks ready for some whipsmart repartee and a sundowner. She seems very comfortable in her own skin, which is unusual anyway when you’re not quite 30, but especially incongruous given her various screen personas: first, in Game of Thrones. Thirteen when she was cast as Sansa Stark, 14 when she started filming, she embodied anxious, aristocratic self-possession at an age when a regular human can’t even keep track of their own socks. Six seasons in, arguably at peak GoT impact, she became Jean Grey in X-Men: Apocalypse, a role she reprised in 2019 for Dark Phoenix, action-studded and ram-jammed with superpowers.

Now she’s the lead in Steal, a Prime Video drama about a corporate heist, though that makes it sound quite desk and keyboard-based when, in fact, it is white-knuckle tense and alarmingly paced. The villains move in a malevolent swarm like hornets; hapless middle managers are slain almost immediately; it’s impossible to tell for the longest time whether we’re looking at gangster thugs or hacking geniuses, motivated by avarice or anarchy. It’s a first-time screenplay by novelist Sotiris Nikias (who writes crime under a pseudonym, Ray Celestin), and it feels original, not so much in the action and hyperviolence as in the trade-offs it refuses to make: whatever explosions are going on, however much chasing around a dystopian pension-fund investment office, you still wouldn’t call it an action drama. It has a novelistic feel, like characters from a David Nicholls book woke up in Die Hard, and there’s a constant swirl, as you try to figure out who’s the assailed and who’s the assailant.

The Chilean film-maker’s psychedelic work earned him the title ‘king of the midnight movie’, and a fan in John Lennon. Now the 96-year-old is ready for the end – but first there is more living to do

There is an apocryphal story of an ageing Orson Welles introducing himself to the guests at a half-empty town hall. “I am an actor, a writer, a producer and a director,” he said. “I am a magician and I appear on stage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?”

If a fantasy author were to dream up Welles’s psychedelic cousin, he’d likely have the air of Alejandro Jodorowsky: serene and white-bearded with a crocodile smile, presiding over a niche band of disciples. He has been – variously, often concurrently – a director, an actor, a poet, a puppeteer, a psychotherapist, a tarot-card reader, an author of fantasy books. At the age of 96, Jodorowsky estimates that he’s lived 100 different lives and embodied 100 different Jodorowskys. “Because we are different people all the time,” he says. “I died a lot of times but then I’m reborn. Look at me now and you see I’m alive. I am happy about this. It is fantastic to live.”

The Uru Chipaya, one of South America’s most ancient civilisations, are battling drought, salinity and an exodus of their people as the climate crisis wreaks havoc on their land

In the small town of Chipaya, everything is dry. Only a few people walk along the sandy streets, and many houses look abandoned – some secured with a padlock. The wind is so strong that it forces you to close your eyes.

Chipaya lies on Bolivia’s Altiplano, 35 miles from the Chilean border. The vast plateau, nearly 4,000 metres above sea level, feels almost empty of people and animals, its solitude framed by snow-capped volcanoes. It raises the question: can anybody possibly live here?

Pandan leaf brings fragrant southern Asian sweetness to a mix of rice gin, white vermouth and green chartreuse

At Bun House Disco, we’re all about bringing the vibrancy of late-night 1980s Hong Kong to Shoreditch, east London, and paying homage to a time when the island came alive after dark. In that same spirit, our cocktail list nods to the classics, but also features all sorts of Chinese and Asian ingredients and spices.

Serves 1

Linus Leung, Bun House Disco, London E2

Reform UK’s newest MP said he made the decision to leave the Tories over Christmas.

• ‘Enough already’: Jenrick’s defection gets mixed reception from Reform members

Kemi Badenoch said Robert Jenrick is now “Nigel Farage’s problem” and that he creates “instability” wherever he goes.

The Conservative party leader told the Press Association that Tories who supported Jenrick feel “betrayed” he has joined Reform UK.

Absolutely, he’s Nigel Farage’s problem. Now he and his acolytes are people who create instability wherever they go, and they can go do that in Reform.

They are a party that is just about people who want drama and intrigue - the public, quite frankly, are sick of this.

Judge finds Durham trust violated nurses’ dignity and created intimidating environment by allowing use of single-sex space

A group of nurses who complained about a trans colleague using single-sex changing rooms at work suffered harassment, an employment tribunal judge has ruled.

The judge found the nurses’ dignity was violated and they encountered “a hostile, intimidating, humiliating and degrading environment” at work.

• Forward due to fly back from Afcon on Sunday

• Liverpool play Champions League game on Wednesday

Liverpool are in talks with Mohamed Salah over the forward making an immediate return to Arne Slot’s squad for their Champions League trip to Marseille next week.

Salah is due back at Liverpool after Egypt’s involvement in the Africa Cup of Nations ends on Saturday. Egypt face Nigeria in a third-place play-off in Casablanca after suffering another loss to a Sadio Mané-inspired Senegal in the semi-finals. The 33-year-old Salah travelled to Morocco with uncertainty surrounding his future having accused the club of throwing him “under the bus” after a poor run of results and claiming he no longer had a relationship with Slot. Liverpool are unbeaten in the 11 matches since Slot first dropped Salah at West Ham.

By welcoming ‘Honest Bob’ Jenrick into the fold, the Reform seer is embracing the uniparty chaos he claimed to be seeing off

Like a 1970s rust-belt serial killer, Nigel Farage is painstakingly assembling around him the political corpses of Boris Johnson’s final, terrible cabinet. Think about it. You never see Reform’s defectors after the initial unveiling press conference, and I’m beginning to wonder what happens to them. I think Nigel amateurishly embalms them or stuffs them with horsehair and sackcloth, then seats them round a “cabinet” table in his cellar, where they all silently agree with him at all times, and never interrupt him.

But look, I’m prepared to consider more outlandish fan theories too, particularly after the sheer farce of Robert Jenrick’s defection on Thursday. If Nigel’s sloppy-seconding carries on at this rate, the Reform/Conservative party differentiation is going to feel a lot like it did when Bucks Fizz factionalised and split, then mounted rival tours of the UK. Neither music nor the United Kingdom was the beneficiary.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Russian attacks on Ukraine’s power plants as severe frost set in have been described as ‘crimes against humanity’

Outside the main pumping station for Bucha, three engineers, bundled up in parkas, are working on the emergency generator keeping the Ukrainian city supplied with water.

One holds a heat gun to the generator’s filter in an effort to unfreeze it, his face reddened by blowing snow and a daytime temperature of -12C (10.4F). Watching attentively is the city’s mayor, Anatolii Fedoruk. The generator in his office is also frozen when the Guardian visits and he apologises for the lack of coffee.

Reform leader calls the child sexual abuse offender ‘a good man, a really good guy’ in 27-second Cameo video clip

Nigel Farage has fallen victim to another prank on the paid video service Cameo, this time paying tribute to the child sexual abuse offender Ian Watkins.

Cameo allows fans to pay celebrities to make personalised video messages, with the Reform party leader offering his services from £78.45.

After Renee Good’s killing in Minneapolis, calls grow for accountability in the shooting of Keith Porter Jr on New Year’s Eve

Family and friends of a Los Angeles man who was killed by an off-duty US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer over the holidays are urging local officials to arrest and prosecute the federal agent.

Keith Porter Jr, a 43-year-old father of two, was fatally shot by an ICE officer on New Year’s Eve outside his apartment complex, according to LA and federal officials. An LA police department (LAPD) spokesperson said after the incident that Porter had fired gunshots into the air. A US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson said the off-duty immigration officer was “forced to defensively use his weapon” while responding to an “active shooter”.

The woodwind player who taught André 3000 music theory releases his searching debut album next month

From Los Angeles
Recommend if you like Miguel Atwood Ferguson, Shabaka Hutchings’s flute music, the Coltranes
Up next Debut album And So It Is released 13 February

For woodwind players, breath is everything: the lifeforce of artistry, the thing that furnishes sound with personality. But a few years ago, the Los Angeles saxophonist Aaron Shaw realised he was becoming increasingly breathless. In 2023, aged 27, he was diagnosed with bone marrow failure, meaning he wasn’t producing enough oxygen-carrying red blood cells. A change of approach was required.

The Cut Up by Louise Welsh; The Persian by David McCloskey; The 10:12 by Anna Maloney; Very Slowly All at Once by Lauren Schott; Vivian Dies Again by CE Hulse

The Cut Up by Louise Welsh (Canongate, £20)
This welcome third outing for gay Glaswegian auctioneer Rilke opens with his discovery of a body. Obnoxious jewellery dealer Rodney Manderson has been killed outside the Bowery auction rooms, stabbed through the eye with the Victorian hatpin that his boss, Rose Bowery, has brandished in front of the nation on Bargain Hunt. As she discussed the pin’s virtues as a deadly weapon as well as its millinerial uses, the fiercely loyal Rilke decides – while feeling grateful to have skipped lunch and trying not to think of jelly – to remove it before calling the police. They soon decide they’ve got their man, but Rilke’s not so sure; the roots of the crime may lie in the past – in particular, a notorious reform school. With a central character who feels like an old friend, The Cut Up is as sharply observed, humane and beautifully written as its two superb predecessors.

The Persian by David McCloskey (Swift, £20)
Former CIA analyst McCloskey’s fourth novel centres on Jewish Iranian dentist Kam Esfahani. Dissatisfied with life in Sweden, where his family relocated when driven out of Iran, and wanting the wherewithal to move to California, he accepts an offer from the chief of Mossad’s Caesarea Division. Returning to Tehran, he runs a fake dental practice as cover for assisting in “sowing chaos and mayhem in Iran”. Things go awry when he enlists double agent Roya Shabani, widow of an Iranian scientist killed by the Israelis. The book takes the form of a series of confessions that Kam, now caught and imprisoned, is forced to write by his torturer, and these documents – which may or may not reveal the whole truth – are interspersed with flashbacks. Kam’s cynical tone and mordant humour serve to underline not only the horror, but also the inherent hypocrisy of the endless cycle of violence and retribution: this masterly novel is tragically topical and utterly gripping.

• Wangerheim joins from Hammarby on contract to 2029

• WSL2 Birmingham land fellow Swede Leidhammar

Manchester United have signed the Sweden forward Ellen Wangerheim from Hammarby on a contract until June 2029. The 21-year-old becomes the Women’s Super League side’s third signing of the January transfer window, after Hanna Lundkvist and Lea Schüller.

Matt Johnson, United’s director of women’s football, told the club’s media channels that Wangerheim was “one of Europe’s best young talents”, saying: “As a dynamic, invasive and versatile forward Ellen brings variation and a natural scoring instinct to the team. Everyone at the club is excited to have her at Manchester United and the opportunity to help maximise her potential.”

Force paid to fly TikTok influencer back to UK after he avoided police custody for almost 12 months

Using a £16,000 private flight to extradite a TikTok influencer wanted on dangerous driving charges back to the UK was “not necessary or proportionate”, a judge has told Surrey police.

Harrison Sullivan, 24, known as HSTikkyTokky, had to be repatriated to the UK last summer after he avoided police custody for almost 12 months after a car crash in Virginia Water, Surrey, in March 2024.

Is there any circumstance on Earth that would make these people not sit this thing out?

The truest thing ever said about the Golden Globes was by Tina Fey when she hosted the awards in 2019 and described the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group of junket hacks, as operating out of the “back booth of a French McDonalds”. The HFPA was disbanded in 2023 after allegations of racism, but 95 former members retained voting rights and on Monday, the show went on.

The campaign by ‘Candidate Vieira’ mirrors the country’s growing anti-establishment sentiment

In Lisbon’s Campo de Ourique market earlier this week, conversation had turned – a little inevitably – to Sunday’s presidential election, which will decide who will take over from the outgoing Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.

But amid the usual claims and counter-claims, promises and pledges, one candidate has been offering voters something a bit more enticing than his competitors.

Reducing the number of rooms while creating more space turned an uninspiring house into a thing of beauty with an exotic garden to match

Already weary from multiple house viewings that didn’t meet their criteria, Purvi Harlalka and Jyothish George were unenthused when details of a large, long-neglected HMO (house of multiple occupancy) in north London dropped into their inbox. First impressions in real life were equally lacklustre, at least for George.

“We arrived for our viewing and he whispered, ‘There’s no way we’re going to buy this dump!’” says Harlalka. “But later, I convinced him of its potential. It had so much light and, importantly, a garden. I knew it was the one.”

I’d love to claim the Hand & Heart in Nottingham taught me something profound – but it was mostly about bankrolling free rounds

When I was a teenager, before Tripadvisor, pubs lived as mental notes rather than star ratings. There was the one where – exactly like that scene in The Inbetweeners – we realised they’d serve us a pint at 16 if we ordered some food (one shared plate of chips). There was the one you might get lucky in on Christmas Eve; the one you’d take a girl to, to impress her with the romantic views; and the one that only served cider in halves because it was so brain cell-poppingly strong – a pub best tackled before a bank holiday Monday, known colloquially as “Super Cider Sunday”, when you still had a few brain cells to spare.

These long, hangover-free January weekends offer a great opportunity for some horticultural housekeeping

Lots of pressure at this time of year, isn’t there? All those pink cheeks and sweaty brows puffing their way around the park in dusted-down trainers; all those Botivo mocktails (delicious, for what it’s worth) as we strive to self-improve during one of the most grisly months of the year. I’ve never really been one for resolutions, nor time-measured sobriety (amazing how having small children deflates one’s desire to drink enough to conjure a hangover). I prefer to believe that we should mirror what the outdoor world is doing at this time: namely hibernating in an attempt to store up energy for the warmer months that are to come.

Still, if you really feel you must do something vaguely horticultural at this time of year, can I suggest you get your seeds in order? I still think about a photograph I saw of Monty Don’s seed stash in a colour supplement years ago. It was housed in a pleasingly bashed-up vintage index-card cabinet, tucked against the wall of his potting shed – a building with more natural light and square footage than many flats I’ve lived in. How chic! How clever! How deliciously organised!

Veteran president holding off main challenger Bobi Wine after campaign marred by violence at opposition rallies

The veteran Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, held a commanding lead in early presidential election results announced on Friday, as conflicting accounts emerged of violence after the vote.

Museveni, who is 81 and has ruled Uganda since seizing power in 1986, is seeking a decisive victory after a campaign marred by violence at opposition rallies.