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guardianworldnews_feedChris Philp says Mary-Ann Stephenson is dismissing ‘legitimate concerns about mass migration’
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, used an interview with the Observer published at the weekend to suggest that he favours joining a customs union with the EU. This is something that Keir Starmer has ruled out.
But Labour supporters back Streeting on this. According to YouGov polling for the Times, 80% of people who voted Labour at the last general election say a future leader should open negotiations on joining a customs union with the EU.
Continue reading...No more kitchen martyrs – a guide to sharing the load at Christmas
Dec. 22nd, 2025 12:30 pmguardianworldnews_feedFrom peeling sprouts to pouring drinks, there’s an art to being genuinely useful during festive cooking
• Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast
“Anything I can do to help?” If ever a line was guaranteed to incense the person in charge of cooking for a crowd, it is this one: uttered in seeming innocence by a guest roused by the sound of clattering pans, and who wants to seem polite but in reality hopes the answer is: “No, thank you.” This was drilled out of us from a young age by a mother who firmly believed that those who are serious about helping need not look far to find vegetables to chop or pots to wash up. But for guests who can’t “read” kitchens – or minds, for that matter – there are some principles that might prove helpful at this time of year. And, for hosts who hate delegating, there are a few ways to share the load (and increase the fun) without losing your sanity.
The easiest and perhaps most obvious job at Christmas is to pour drinks: for the principal cook first, and then for others. Not only does popping a cork or shaking a cocktail make a cook feel less like a caterer and more like part of the party, the sound has the effect of drawing in other helpers. “If you make a cocktail and divvy out jobs, even peeling vegetables is fun,” says Wahaca founder and Guardian regular Thomasina Miers, who enlists everyone in preparing for festivities.
Continue reading...Chinese robotaxis due in London next year as Lyft and Uber reveal tie-ups
Dec. 22nd, 2025 12:20 pmguardianworldnews_feedFirms agree deals with Beijing-based Baidu to take self-driving cabs to UK capital
Chinese robotaxis are due to be on the streets of London next year after the US ride-hailing companies Lyft and Uber announced tie-ups with Beijing-based Baidu to deploy its self-driving technology.
Lyft is the third firm to announce plans to introduce self-driving taxis to the UK capital next year, following Uber and Waymo, the main operator of robotaxis in the US.
Continue reading...Villarreal tried everything against Barcelona – except moving the game to Miami | Sid Lowe
Dec. 22nd, 2025 12:17 pmguardianworldnews_feedIn a match mercifully on Spanish soil, Villarreal bombarded Barça but were undone by profligacy and ill-discipline
Marcelino García Toral came bounding down the steps like an excited schoolboy when the bell goes. He flew past the substitutes and staff, skidded left, and sprinted up the line all wide-eyed and excited, shaking his fists and beaming. He had gone 15 or 20 metres, maybe 25 when he realised – just a fraction later than everyone else – that something had gone wrong again. So Villarreal’s manager put the brakes on and his head down, and turned back towards the bench feeling almost as silly as this was getting. This, he already suspected, was going to be one of those days.
They had been playing 16 minutes and the goal Villarreal had scored, the goal Jules Koundé scored for them, wasn’t a goal at all. Just as the chance they made after 80 seconds wasn’t, Nicolas Pépé putting wide from a yard out. Just as Ayoze Pérez’s opportunity on six minutes wasn’t a goal, Tajon Buchanan’s effort on 13 wasn’t, and Raphinha’s on nine minutes was. One moment – a dash, a tumble and a penalty and from nowhere Villarreal trailed Barcelona as two of La Liga’s best teams met on the Mediterranean, not in Miami. Barcelona beat Villarreal 2-0.
Continue reading...Freed Nigerian schoolchildren to be reunited with families
Dec. 22nd, 2025 12:00 pmguardianworldnews_feedMonth-long ordeal ends but no details released on how they regained their freedom or who was behind abduction
A final group of 130 kidnapped Nigerian schoolchildren freed by the government on Sunday are expected to be reunited with their families in the central Niger state on Monday, ending a month-long ordeal that drew global concern.
Last month, unknown gunmen took an estimated 215 schoolchildren and 12 teachers from St Mary’s Catholic school, Papiri community in Niger state, which runs west from the capital, Abuja, to neighbouring Benin.
Continue reading...UK consumers saving less as taxes squeeze incomes, data shows
Dec. 22nd, 2025 12:00 pmguardianworldnews_feedONS finds households’ savings ratio has dropped to lowest rate for more than a year across third quarter
UK consumers saved less money during the third quarter of the year as higher taxes squeezed disposable incomes.
The households’ saving ratio – which estimates the percentage of disposable income Britons save rather than spend – dropped 0.7 percentage points to 9.5%, the Office for National Statistics said. That is the lowest rate for more than a year.
Continue reading...The best art and photography of 2025
Dec. 22nd, 2025 12:00 pmguardianworldnews_feedJenny Saville’s bruising paintings, Andy Goldsworthy’s immersive stones, Lee Miller’s surrealist shots and Diane Arbus’s unforgiving nudes – our critics highlight a spectacular year
• The best design and architecture of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025
Who knew that aging also produces cramps in the arch of the foot?
Dec. 22nd, 2025 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneBut I haven't had much of that problem since then. ( Read more... ) However, just in the last few years I've occasionally noticed a twinge or mini-cramp that goes away after a few seconds specifically in the arch of my left foot. It's never lasted beyond a moment or two until like... last week once when I was walking up the stairs and then yesterday in the grocery store, when it suddenly twinged so hard into a cramp that I spent a minute and a half limping and whispering "Ow, ow, ow!" until it subsided.
It doesn't have to be caused by age, of course, but I don't know what else could have caused it, unless it is protesting the fact that I have not been walking enough in the last year. I used to have a tennis-sized hard rubber ball to roll on the arch of my feet, when I was working on my feet a lot in retail. But I can't remember where I put it.
Organ-tuning books in English churches provide notes on a warming climate
Dec. 22nd, 2025 12:05 pmguardianworldnews_feedResearchers have realised the records are a ‘goldmine’ to study changes in environmental conditions
Yangang Xing had never heard of organ-tuning books, but his colleague Andrew Knight often played the pipe organ at churches as a teenager.
When the pair, who are researchers at Nottingham Trent University, set out to study how environmental conditions in churches had changed over time, Knight explained that all over the country many organs had notebooks full of data tucked away in their recesses.
This article was first published by The Reengineer
Continue reading...guardianworldnews_feedChris Philp says Mary-Ann Stephenson is dismissing ‘legitimate concerns about mass migration’
Mary-Ann Stephenson, the new chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, has said that the “demonisation of migrants” is bad for Britain. (See 10.21am.)
This morning we have published a video report illustrating what she is worried about. It is about the rise in hate crimes, and it features the Muslim journalist Taj Ali visiting smaller more isolated minority communities around the UK to find out the impact this is having.
I remember thinking that the pandemic really showed just how dependent we all are upon the workers that keep our country going. But just because we are out of those times, does not mean that their sacrifice for all of us has stopped. Quite the opposite. So on behalf of everyone in the country, I would like to thank them and their colleagues who are heading out to work on Christmas Day to keep the rest of us safe and healthy. It’s a huge sacrifice, and it lets the rest of us celebrate Christmas with our families in peace.
We laid out 17 tables in a single-run through the first floor, decorated with 10 table runners, 60 miniature Christmas trees, 70 tea lights, a Christmas cracker for each person, and 93 hand-written place cards.
In the corner we set up a hot chocolate station for the kids with gingerbread, Christmas stickers, arts and crafts.
Continue reading...Doctor Zhivago at 60: David Lean’s sweeping romantic relic endures
Dec. 22nd, 2025 12:03 pmguardianworldnews_feedJulie Christie remains as magnetic as ever in the mammoth big screen adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s once dangerous novel
There’s no more perfect illustration of the cinematic crossroads of the mid-1960s than the year Julie Christie had in 1965. First, she starred as an amoral model in John Schlesinger’s Darling, a snapshot of Swinging London that reflected the trendy, flashy, forward-thinking culture that had seduced young adults. Then she starred as an elusive Russian beauty in Doctor Zhivago, a three-hour-plus historical epic from David Lean that was as stodgy and old-fashioned as Darling was suggestive of the future. There was an appetite for both that year – credit Christie’s astonishing magnetism for that, at least in part – but a sense that one era was crashing into another and times were about to change.
It seems fitting, then, that Doctor Zhivago is about what happens when history takes a turn and a band of insurgents make a once-stable and familiar place seem completely unrecognizable. It’s easy to imagine a master like Lean, who’d just made Lawrence of Arabia a few years earlier, feeling a bit like his hero, Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif), a celebrated poet whose work suddenly falls out of favor after the Russian Revolution. Though Doctor Zhivago was honored with a raft of Oscar nominations – and five wins, mostly in technical categories – many contemporary reviews had dismissed it as an ossified romance, disengaged with the harsh realities of early-to-mid-1900s Russia. Even 60 years later, it feels like a relic of an earlier era.
Continue reading...Freed Nigerian schoolchildren set to be reunited with families
Dec. 22nd, 2025 12:00 pmguardianworldnews_feedMonth-long ordeal ends but no details released on how they regained their freedom or who was behind abduction
A final group of 130 kidnapped Nigerian schoolchildren freed by the government on Sunday are expected to be reunited with their families in the central Niger state on Monday, ending a month-long ordeal that drew global concern.
Last month, unknown gunmen took an estimated 215 schoolchildren and 12 teachers from St Mary’s Catholic school, Papiri community in Niger state, which runs west from the capital, Abuja, to neighbouring Benin.
Continue reading...UK consumers saving less as taxes squeeze incomes, data shows
Dec. 22nd, 2025 12:00 pmguardianworldnews_feedONS finds households’ savings ratio has dropped to lowest rate for more than a year across third quarter
UK consumers saved less money during the third quarter of the year, as higher taxes squeezed disposable incomes.
The households’ saving ratio – which estimates the percentage of disposable income Britons save rather than spend – dropped 0.7 percentage points to 9.5%, the Office for National Statistics said. That is the lowest rate for more than a year.
Continue reading...John Updike’s best books – Ranked!
Dec. 22nd, 2025 12:00 pmguardianworldnews_feedFollowing the publication of the novelist’s letters, we count down the best of his books, from the dark magic of The Witches of Eastwick to the misadventures of Rabbit Angstrom
Inspired by and drawing on three British novels (HG Wells’s The Time Machine, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Henry Green’s Concluding), Updike’s debut imagines a near future where the residents of a care home stage a revolt in which two antagonists, John Hook and Stephen Conner, struggle for supremacy. A curio.
Updike tropes Religion, death
‘It’s not up to me is it?’ McCullum wants to stay on despite England’s Ashes defeat
Dec. 22nd, 2025 12:00 pmguardianworldnews_feedCoach insists his methods are not about scoring rates
Paying off McCullum’s contract would cost seven figures
Brendon McCullum has stressed his desire to stay on as England head coach but acknowledged this is now a question for those higher up.
Australia winning this much-anticipated Ashes series at the earliest opportunity has thrust McCullum’s role into the spotlight but with a multi-format contract that runs up to the end of the 50-over World Cup in late 2027, removing him would cost English cricket a seven-figure sum.
Continue reading...Five big global health wins in 2025 that will save millions of lives
Dec. 22nd, 2025 12:00 pmguardianworldnews_feedFrom HIV to TB, scientists and doctors made breakthroughs in treatment and prevention of some of the world’s deadliest diseases
With humanitarian funding slashed by the US and other countries, including the UK, this year’s global health headlines have made grim reading. But good things have still been happening in vaccine research and the development of new and improved treatments for some of the most intractable illnesses.
Continue reading...The best art and photography of 2025
Dec. 22nd, 2025 12:00 pmguardianworldnews_feedJenny Saville’s bruising paintings, Andy Goldsworthy’s immersive stones, Lee Miller’s surrealist shots and Diane Arbus’s unforgiving nudes – our critics highlight a spectacular year
• The best design and architecture of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025
guardianworldnews_feedI grew up in a Muslim family in Dubai, but became obsessed with the Hallmark vision of Christmas, and with Macaulay Culkin. The reality was a disappointment only Home Alone could assuage
When I was eight years old, I was living in Dubai and desperate to experience a western Christmas. My family are Muslim, and Christmas was something we’d never celebrated – but after consuming countless festive Hallmark movies, I was hooked on the dream of having turkey, tinsel and, most importantly, presents. I also had an enormous crush on Macaulay Culkin, and thought if I could experience Christmas for myself it would somehow bring me closer to him.
After months of badgering my parents about why my twin brother and I deserved Christmas, they relented. My beautiful Iraqi-Egyptian mother took on the task with gumption, finding the largest, tackiest tree you can imagine.
Continue reading...The best design and architecture of 2025
Dec. 22nd, 2025 12:00 pmguardianworldnews_feedThis year’s highlights include the remodelling of a Richard Seifert brutalist ‘corncob’ tower, a celebration of Japanese carpentry and a wearable hot-water bottle
• The best art and photography of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025
In a case of contents outshining the container, the V&A’s national museum of everything takes the public up close and personal to a gallimaufry of precious things, from porcelain to poison darts, textiles to tiaras. Elegantly shoehorned into the gargantuan hangar that was originally the broadcasting centre for the 2012 Olympics, it’s an Amazon warehouse crammed with global treasures, setting visitors off on an odyssey of “curated transgression” through an immersive cabinet of curiosities.
Continue reading...