Nine episodes in, Radon Liz’s YouTube show is as laughably deranged as ever

A world on the brink. Regime change in Venezuela. Greenland under threat from Donald Trump. Shadow fleet tanker seized by the US and the Brits in the North Atlantic. The Europeans battling to keep America onside in any Ukraine peace deal. A woman gunned down by ICE agents in Minneapolis.

So thank God that some things never change. Be grateful we still have Liz Truss. The UK’s lone fixed point. Our very own guilty secret. The prime minister we all try our best to forget we ever had, if only Liz would let us. But Truss is like that Japanese soldier who only realised the second world war was over in 1974. For Liz, global events mean nothing. She will keep fighting the Great Betrayal of 2022 for as long as she has breath. It’s all that gives her life meaning.

I found solace in looking through my father’s slides after he died. They made me gasp – and my childhood turned from monotonous monochrome to glorious Technicolor

When my sister handed me a box of old Kodachrome slides last summer, I almost didn’t bother looking through them. Unusually for pre-smartphone times, my camera-crazy father had extensively documented our lives, filling dozens of photo albums. What could the transparencies possibly reveal that we hadn’t already seen countless times? I dimly remembered him ambushing us to watch slideshows, until we were old enough to rebel.

My father died in 2012. Not long before, I had developed an interest in photography myself and, after he was gone, I found solace in my viewfinder. It was, and still is, a way of feeling connected to him. What prompted me to set up my iPad as a makeshift lightbox to view the slides was technical interest.

At the Oxford farming conference there were signs the government has much to do to win back farmers’ trust

Few symbols were more potent than the wooden coffin bearing the inscription “RIP British agriculture, 30th October 2024” that greeted Labour’s environment minister at the annual Oxford farming conference.

It marked the date of Rachel Reeves’s first budget, when she announced plans to levy inheritance tax on farms. For the chancellor’s cabinet colleague Emma Reynolds, it underlined the anger among Britain’s farmers.

An agent shot a woman in Minneapolis, causing vast and needless grief. Our country is diseased – but that is not the only truth

A woman in Minneapolis has died as her neighbors fought Donald Trump’s mass deportation operation. On Wednesday morning, a group of local civilian protesters gathered around a site where several ICE agents were attempting to abduct migrants. The agents were part of a surge of roughly 2,000 deportation officers who have been sent to Minneapolis as part of Trump’s effort to persecute the Somali community there. In a disturbing incident caught on video by multiple onlookers, a woman driving in an SUV covered in bumper stickers blocked traffic on the residential road – perhaps as part of an effort to keep ICE vehicles from passing. In the videos, an ICE agent approaches the SUV, yelling: “Get out of the car. Get out of the fucking car.” He stands at the driver’s side, with his feet clear of the vehicle, and reaches into where the woman is driving. She begins to drive away, and an officer fires three shots, the last from behind the vehicle as the car pulls away from him. The SUV then crashes into a parked vehicle as onlookers scream in distress. “You did a murder, for what?” one of the protesters calls out to the agents.

The driver, a US citizen who was described by Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar as a “legal observer”, was declared dead. She died less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020. Her name was Renee Nicole Good, and she was 37.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Research finds growing trend of employers letting employees work remotely to free up more holiday time

Katherine first caught the bug when she visited Australia a couple of years ago. The flights were expensive, and it was a once in a lifetime opportunity, so she asked her manager if she could extend the trip by two weeks, and work remotely from her friend’s house.

That was her first taste of a “workation” – combining working with a holiday – and she loved it. She now regularly arranges petsitting in different places so she can visit family, friends and new cities for long weekends without spending extra.

An online conspiracy theory has left hysterical fans believing that the Netflix show’s finale was a fake. Could Vecna still come back with a secret episode?

In recent days, my 14-year-old daughter has been exhibiting signs of becoming a conspiracy theorist. But this isn’t your common or garden Twin-Towers-grassy-knoll-moon-landings business. She has fallen, entirely and joyfully, for a conjecture known as Conformity Gate – and she is not the only one.

For the non Gen-Zers out there, Conformity Gate is the theory that the much-vaunted finale of Netflix behemoth Stranger Things, released on 1 January in the UK, wasn’t the real finale at all.

Fuelled by energy drinks and pasty from lack of sunlight, fans of the show have been beavering away in basements around the world to produce a fantastical hypothesis that the finale’s rather soupy 40-minute epilogue was all an illusion created by the show’s mind-controlling villain Vecna. A secret final episode, showing what had really happened, would be released on 7 January, at 8pm US Eastern Time (1am in the UK).

Explaining the labyrinthine intricacies of the “evidence” cited by Conformiteers would take thousands of words. Essentially, it involves some people sitting with their hands in their lap wearing orange graduation gowns, too many people wearing glasses, a roll of dice totalling seven, a dial changing colour, a wonky milkshake-timeline, strategically positioned exit signs, a woman having short hair, a door handle switching sides, a character missing some scars, and one of the characters remarking that the town of Hawkins “feels different” – hardly surprising, as it’s no longer full of murderous monsters, cracks in the earth, and a psychopath made out of tree roots.

Exclusive: Dulwich college contemporaries say Reform leader often used antisemitic language and racial epithets

Thirty-four school contemporaries of Nigel Farage have now come forward to claim they saw him behave in a racist or antisemitic manner, raising fresh questions over the Reform leader’s evolving denials.

One of those with new allegations is Jason Meredith, who was three years below Farage at Dulwich college, a private school in south-east London. He claims that Farage called him a “paki” and would use taunts such as “go back home”.

Up to 30cm of snow expected in Wales and Midlands with winds of up to 100mph across exposed hills and coastal areas

Red and amber weather warnings have been issued across the UK as Storm Goretti evolves into a “weather bomb” expected to bring up to 30cm of snowfall in Wales and the Midlands and winds of up to 100mph (160km/h) in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

The Met Office on Thursday described Goretti, the first named storm of 2026, as a “multi-hazard event”, expected to be more powerful than Storm Ciarán in 2023 and the Great Storm of 1987.

NASUWT members at Ravensfield and Lily Lane schools say nine-day stoppage follows ‘almost daily’ attacks by pupils

Teachers at two primary schools in Greater Manchester say they have been driven to strike because of “almost daily” attacks by pupils, leaving parents bewildered by the industrial action.

Members of the NASUWT teaching union at Ravensfield and Lily Lane primary schools are taking nine days of strike action, from this week until 22 January, because of what the union called “a culture of violence” involving an increasing number of assaults by pupils against staff and other children.

Minneapolis remains on edge, with several protests planned after shooting of Renee Nicole Macklin Good

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The FBI has taken full control of the investigation into the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Macklin Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) officer in Minneapolis, it emerged on Thursday.

In a statement, the Minneosta Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) said it was initially called upon to help investigate the shooting before federal officials “reversed course” and said the case would be “solely led by the FBI”. With its access to the case materials, witnesses and evidence revoked, the BCA said it had to “reluctantly” withdraw from the investigation.