In Portishead, a dusty box of forgotten files led Jo Smith and her team to a criminal who had escaped justice for more than half a century. This was the longest-running cold case to be solved in the UK, and possibly the world

In June 2023, Jo Smith, a major crime review officer for Avon and Somerset police, was asked by her sergeant to “take a look at the Louisa Dunne case”. Louisa Dunne was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a hub of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a well-known figure in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the police investigation unearthed little to go on apart from a palm print on a rear window. Police knocked on 8,000 doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed unsolved.

He stole our hearts in The Celebrity Traitors – then it all went wrong. The actor and comedian opens up

When I catch up with Nick Mohammed, he is on the set of War, a new HBO series. Full of legal eagles, tech-bro hot shots and ugly divorces, it’s a punchy, slick enterprise, nothing at all like The Celebrity Traitors – except for the high drama, unbearable tension and the fact that Mohammed is reunited with Celia Imrie. Traitors was filmed in April and May and this started in September, so they both knew exactly what had happened in the castle, but were still in their chamber of deadly secrecy. Mainly, Mohammed was happy just to kick about with Imrie again. “She’s wonderful,” he says. “Everything you think she might be, she absolutely is – she’s just brilliant.”

Which brings us to the root of the problem, the answer to the question: “What the hell happened, Nick?” Spoiler alert: we intend to talk about exactly what went down in the most infuriating Traitors final since, well, the last non-celebrity Traitors. If Joe Marler had had his way, he and Nick would have sauntered to victory, Alan Carr’s magisterial fibbing finally unmasked. Instead, Nick’s niggling doubts brought down the ship.

It was 2020, and I hired a gazebo and heaters so we could have a festive feast with my mum in the garden. What could possibly go wrong?

We called it “diffmas”, because it was going to be a different kind of Christmas. Our son was five, so we were trying to package it appealingly for him. But we might have done that anyway, given the kind of year we’d had – and by “we” I don’t just mean my family, I mean the world.

It was 2020. When the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, had announced, in March, that we “must stay at home”, it left my mum, who had lived on her own since my dad died in 2012, completely alone, like many people, for months on end. Her work had involved travelling all over the country, having meetings, organising events, networking. Then, in lockdown, everything stopped. She was Zooming with the best of them, but it was clearly extremely difficult.

Seaweed has become a key cash crop as climate change and industrial trawling test the resilient culture of the semi-nomadic Vezo people

Along Madagascar’s south-west coast, the Vezo people, who have fished the Mozambique Channel for countless generations, are defined by a way of life sustained by the sea. Yet climate change and industrial exploitation are pushing this ocean-based culture to its limits.

Coastal villages around Toliara, a city in southern Madagascar, host tens of thousands of the semi-nomadic Vezo people, who make a living from small-scale fishing on the ocean. For centuries, they have launched pirogues, small boats carved from single tree trunks, every day into the turquoise shallows to catch tuna, barracuda and grouper.

A boat near lines of seaweed, which has become a main source of income for Ambatomilo village as warmer seas, bleached reefs and erratic weather accelerate the decline of local fish populations

Life goes on in a vibrant Greater Manchester neighbourhood after a plan for an attack was thwarted

“They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat,” Andrew Walters said.

It is an old Jewish joke that’s as relevant as ever in Greater Manchester in the face of today’s threats.

The Guardian’s editor-in-chief Katharine Viner looks back on the biggest news stories of 2025

It has been a year dominated by Donald Trump. It has not yet even been 12 full months since his return to the White House in January but already the changes he has wrought – in the US and around the world – would have seemed scarcely conceivable in 2024.

Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, tells Annie Kelly what it has looked like from the editor’s chair: from the deployment of the National Guard on American streets, to the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, to the erosion of the rules that once governed peace and war.

Imran Ahmed and Clare Melford among five Europeans hit with visa bans over claims they wish to ‘suppress American viewpoints they oppose’

And this is what Sarah Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy at the US state department, said on her social media thread last night about why Clare Melford is being sanctioned.

WE’VE SANCTIONED: Clare Melford. She leads Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a UK-based organization that monitors websites for “hate speech” and “disinformation”. If you question Canadian blood libels about residential schools, you’re engaging in “hate speech” according to Melford and GDI. This NGO used @StateDept taxpayer money to exhort censorship and blacklisting of American speech and press. They also joined the deleterious EU Code of Practice on Disinformation.

The anti-Indigenous hate speech section demonstrates how deeply rooted colonial tropes have been refashioned to serve contemporary hate speech goals. These narratives frame Indigenous peoples as corrupt, undeserving of treaty rights, or actively damaging to Canadian prosperity, particularly in contexts related to land use, environmental resistance, or constitutional recognition. Digital denialism around residential schools and abuses against native communities reveals coordinated efforts to delegitimise truth and reconciliation, undermining national commitments to redress historic injustice. These findings are vital for Canada’s ongoing reconciliation efforts, including understanding how settler-state narratives are weaponised by adversarial actors in post-colonial democracies.

The analysis of misogynistic and anti-2SLGBTQIA+ narratives reveals that gendered hate speech is a critical entry point into broader extremist movements online. Women with a public profile, especially women of colour, are disproportionately targeted by harassment, hate speech, and threats of violence. Meanwhile, disinformation targeting queer and trans individuals portrays them as morally corrupt or ideologically dangerous, frequently accusing them of “grooming” or social destabilisation. These narratives are central to the rhetorical arsenal of far-right movements and require urgent attention in online safety, education, and digital governance efforts.

Documents give further insight into former royal’s ties to sex offender and raise fresh questions for Donald Trump

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor asked Jeffrey Epstein’s fixer Ghislaine Maxwell to arrange meetings with “inappropriate friends” while she sought “friendly and discreet and fun” girls on his behalf, the latest documents from the Epstein files appear to show.

The largest release yet of files concerning the financier and convicted child sex offender – which also raise fresh questions for the US president, Donald Trump – include emails in the name of “A” exchanging detailed messages with Maxwell that appeared to identify the author as Andrew.

Emails recording that Britain’s Metropolitan police contacted the FBI last month to inquire whether there were any ongoing investigations related to the disgraced former prince’s association with Epstein.

Emails showing US lawyers claiming “various factual inaccuracies” in a statement provided on Andrew’s behalf during their investigation of Epstein.

Multiple references to Donald Trump, including a claim by a senior US attorney that Trump was on a flight in the 1990s with Epstein and a 20-year-old woman. There is no indication of whether the woman was a victim of any crime, and Trump has consistently denied wrongdoing.

Files featuring redactions that were found to be removable through Photoshop techniques or simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.

Police say incident a ‘domestic violence situation’ and suspect, who also died, was ex-partner of teenager’s mother

A 13-year-old British boy has died after being stabbed at his home in Portugal in an incident that police described as a “domestic violence situation”.

Authorities said the alleged perpetrator, who also died, was the former partner of the boy’s mother.

Home affairs minister, Tony Burke, said the government had ‘no time for hatred when it came to cancelling visas’

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The federal government has cancelled the visa of a British man charged with displaying prohibited Nazi symbols, after police seized swords bearing “swastika symbology” from his Queensland home last month.

Federal police announced earlier this month that a 43-year-old United Kingdom citizen living in Queensland had been charged with three counts of allegedly displaying prohibited Nazi symbols, and one count of using a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence.