A shocking incident should become an opportunity to address broader problems of misogyny

What does the experience of women at the top tell us about the rest? Those most vulnerable to sexual harassment, assault and abuse are, unsurprisingly, those who have less power or are treated with less respect: undocumented migrants; women in precarious employment; women with disabilities; LGBTQ women; young women and girls.

Paradoxically, that helps to explain why the assault of Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, has drawn such outrage domestically and internationally. A drunken man tried to kiss her neck and grabbed her chest as she spoke to citizens in the capital’s streets. It is the proof, captured on camera, that no woman is safe. You can be the most powerful person in the land and a man will still feel entitled to grope you, in front of the world, because you are a woman. When you object, some will complain that you are taking it too seriously, or that it is all made up. As Ms Sheinbaum herself remarked: “If they do this to the president, then what will happen to all the young women in our country?�

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Half of the country’s privately owned countryside is held by just 421 owners. New legislation suggests democrats still fear powerful interests

No other European country has such a narrow base of proprietorship as Scotland. Half of all privately owned rural land is held by 421 people or entities. The roots of such disparities lie in the past. The 18th- and 19th-century Highland clearances emptied the glens and readied them for private takeover. On the continent, and eventually in England, the great estates were broken up by inheritance and land taxes. By comparison, Scotland is still feudal in scale.

The passing of a land reform bill, its supporters say, will change that. But doubts remain. Its proponents say the legislation could allow the Scottish government to intervene in private land sales and require large estates to be broken up. At its heart is the so-called transfer test. This would see Scottish ministers notified before any land sale over 1,000 hectares. However, they lack an explicit veto. If they wanted a more democratic constraint, they could have adopted the Scottish Land Commission’s 2019 proposal for a public interest test – forcing big buyers to openly justify their purchases.

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The increasing ferocity and frequency of tropical storms imposes an unbearable burden on countries including Jamaica

The geographically uneven risks from increasingly extreme and dangerous weather grow ever starker. As Jamaica and other Caribbean countries clear up after Hurricane Melissa, and Typhoon Kalmaegi heads west after killing nearly 200 people in the Philippines and Vietnam, the case for more international support to countries facing the most destructive impacts from global heating has never been stronger.

Last week’s five-day rainfall in Jamaica was made twice as likely by higher temperatures, according to initial findings from climate attribution studies. The current death toll across the Caribbean is at least 75. The economic and social costs are hard to quantify in a region that is still recovering from 2024’s Hurricane Beryl. Crucial infrastructure has been destroyed before the loans used to build it have even been paid off. Andrew Holness, Jamaica’s prime minister, estimates that the damage there is roughly equivalent to one-third of the country’s gross domestic product.

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It might be darker than usual, but this year’s festive offering reflects our fears for boys growing up today

We need look no further than this year’s John Lewis Christmas ad to see that one of the most urgent national conversations is the crisis of boyhood. Fears around the rise of the manosphere, spiralling mental health problems and loneliness among young men have made headlines, from Sir Gareth Southgate’s Richard Dimbleby lecture, in which he expressed fears that “toxic influencers� are replacing traditional father figures, to the phenomenal success of the hit Netflix series Adolescence. Now these anxieties have even crept into the UK’s reliable cultural barometer, the department store’s annual ad.

As this festive institution itself turns 18, it is fitting perhaps that it tells the story of a middle‑aged father and his silent, headphone-wearing teenage son. The gift of a vinyl record of Alison Limerick’s 1990 dance anthem Where Love Lives transports the dad back to his 90s clubbing days, until the pace changes and father and son see each other over the chasm of years. The boy, in true adland style, becomes a toddler and then a baby. We return to their immaculately stylish living room for a hug and a few tears in homes across the country – if Saatchi & Saatchi has done its job.

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Recent cases of prisoners let go by mistake rightly disturb the public. But they reflect the overstretched and underfunded criminal justice architecture

Any mistaken release of a prisoner is a blow to the criminal justice system and creates a danger to public safety and confidence. So is any escape, abscondment or failure to return after temporary release. Failures of this kind nevertheless occur every year in the UK penal systems – not regularly, but often enough for governments to produce annual statistics about them. They are particularly alarming malfunctions in what is already a seriously flawed and pressurised system.

The mistaken release of two separate prisoners from the same prison, however, is unusually disturbing. Human error seemingly played a part in allowing William Smith to walk out of HMP Wandsworth on Monday, the day he had been sentenced to 45 months for several fraud offences. That was bad enough. But the fact that he turned himself in on Thursday at the prison gates without being caught by a police manhunt simply compounds the record of official incompetence.

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Palestinians are being born amid the rubble. They need not only immediate relief but long-term justice

What future is there for Palestinians in Gaza? The announcement of the ceasefire brought profound relief, shaded by an equally deep sense of trepidation. Almost a month later, the picture looks bleaker. The Israeli offensive abated, Hamas has returned the surviving hostages and the remains of some of those who have died, and Israel has released some Palestinian detainees and the remains of others.

But more than 200 Palestinians, including children, have reportedly died in strikes that Israel says are in response to Hamas attacks. Thousands of bodies are still believed to be trapped beneath the ruins ­– debris which, it is estimated, would take a fleet of more than a hundred lorries seven years to shift. Aid is flowing again, but remains wholly inadequate, with NGOs warning that Israel’s new registration system is obstructing delivery. Israeli demolitions continue in the half of Gaza that its forces still hold. Unicef warned this week that the education system – in so far as it survives after two years of war and the destruction of more than 90% of school and university buildings – is on the brink of collapse. New babies are born literally in the rubble, to mothers who have neither homes nor working hospitals.

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A historic campaign that focused on the theme of affordability can offer wider lessons to a re-energised opposition

Since the re-election of Donald Trump last November, a demoralised Democratic party has struggled to reverse a palpable sense of downward momentum. At a grassroots level, amid plunging poll ratings, there has been a yearning for renewal and a more punchy, combative approach in opposition. Against that bleak backdrop, the remarkable election of Zohran Mamdani to the New York City mayoralty is a moment for progressives to savour.

Mr Mamdani entered the mayoral race last October as a socialist outsider with almost zero name recognition. He won it with more than 50% of the vote after the highest turnout in more than half a century, and despite the best efforts of billionaires to bankroll his chief rival, the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, to victory. That achievement makes him the youngest mayor of the US’s largest city for more than 100 years and the first Muslim to occupy the role.

In an age of increasingly capable machines, it makes sense for schools to value creativity and life skills as part of a well-rounded education

Societies evolve and schools are under pressure to adapt, but some features of education policy are perennial. For example, modernisation will always be denounced as a dilution of standards. Inevitably, Conservatives have leapt on recommendations by an independent review, commissioned by the government, as proof that Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, is “dumbing down� the curriculum.

The basis of these charges is that the review, led by Becky Francis, professor of education at University College London, proposes reducing the burden of GCSE exams and scrapping the English baccalaureate – a cluster of subjects that, when taken together, constitute a metric of success recognised in school league tables. Conservatives are also unhappy about the notion that primary schoolchildren should learn about the climate crisis and be encouraged to value diversity.

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The chancellor’s bid to appear fiscally credible hides a deeper weakness: a growth model built on private debt and political theatre, not real economic renewal

Rachel Reeves’s speech was a pre-emptive confession that Labour would almost certainly break its manifesto commitment not to put up income tax in November’s budget. The credibility gap between Labour’s political theatre and the fiscal arithmetic has been obvious for weeks. The economic fundamentals haven’t changed for the chancellor, only the politics have – notably with Reform UK and the Tories making austerity policies central to their pitch.

Ms Reeves wants the coming argument to be that Labour is committed to protecting public services and jobs, while portraying her rightwing opponents as ideologically committed to shrinking the state. This is not a bad idea – if the wealthy fund it. And if a promise has to be broken, she has picked the politically optimal one – as even her shadow, Mel Stride, has conceded.

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Soaring rents and mortages are undermining the social fabric of member states. A coming Brussels plan for affordable housing must be bold

An entrenched housing crisis was one of the dominant themes in last week’s Dutch election, and it is not hard to understand why. House prices in the Netherlands have doubled in the past decade, and a new-build home costs 16 times the average salary. Across the EU, affordability is not just a life-limiting problem in notoriously expensive property markets such as Lisbon, Madrid or Dublin. Speculative investment and a chronic supply shortage have also led to soaring prices in emerging areas where bigger, faster returns are attainable.

Belatedly, this pan-European pattern is to be addressed by a Europe-wide response. Socialist MEPs made action on housing a condition of their continued support for the two-term European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen. Next month, Brussels will publish its first affordable housing plan, which will target the destructive growth of the Airbnb-style rental market and aim to make it easier for governments to subsidise the building of new homes.

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Kneejerk responses undermine the emergency services and contribute to a damaging climate of suspicion

Witnesses to Saturday evening’s stabbings on a train in Cambridgeshire at first wondered if reports of a knife-wielding attacker were a Halloween prank. As passengers fled through the carriages, some of them bleeding and shouting warnings, it became clear that this was one of those terrible moments when a nightmare comes true.

LNER staff and the emergency services deserve credit for their swift response. By diverting the high‑speed service to Huntingdon, train driver Andrew Johnson averted a worse disaster. Another crew member, who remains in a critical condition, has been described by police as “heroic�. Five out of 10 people who were injured in the rampage have been discharged. A suspect, Anthony Williams, was arrested at the scene and has appeared in court.

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A micro-elite in finance and tech hoovers up talent while white-collar jobs lose their lustre. A society that rewards proximity to capital over contribution risks rupture

In the US, the brightest are said to join AI firms. In Britain, they sign up to be quantitative analysts. The Financial Times reports that the City is becoming one of the world’s leading “quant� centres. An Oxford don in charge of mathematical finance told its reporters that almost all his students ended up working at quant trading firms, on salaries from £250,000 to £800,000. “If you get offered a salary less than £250K, you’re kind of the sad guy,� he said, adding that “nobody I know interviews for JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs  … not once do I hear anybody entertain any of these traditional investment banking jobs.�

The lure is obvious: 45-year-old billionaire trader Alex Gerko earned £682m from his City quant firm XTX Markets last year. Harder to grasp is that modest salaries in once respectable professions now function to deter people from the very graduate careers they once defined. On the FT’s front page, employers warned that graduate entrants to City bluechips earn a median yearly salary of £33,000, not much more than the minimum wage, expected to be £26,400 next year. Executives cautioned that university debt no longer yields a wage premium. To preserve profits, firms said they would look to using more AI or offshore roles.

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Targeting the negativity of the far right, the big winner of last week’s poll was able to cut through with voters

One of the tightest elections in Dutch history produced an outcome so close that first steps in negotiating a new coalition government have yet to begin. But at a time when the forward march of the far right across Europe is dominating headlines, sapping the confidence of mainstream parties, one uplifting takeaway was immediately clear: a less divisive kind of politics can still cut through with the public, if it is prosecuted with conviction and panache.

The big and unexpected winner of last week’s poll was 38-year-old Rob Jetten, the charismatic leader of the centrist liberal party D66, which almost tripled its vote and is set to top the polls by a whisker. Basing his campaign on the Obama-style slogan “Yes we can�, Mr Jetten presented himself as an optimistic unifier to an electorate exhausted by the polarising politics of Geert Wilders, whose anti-immigrant Freedom party (PVV) dominated the outgoing coalition. He now has a very good chance of being the country’s youngest-ever prime minister.

From a Van Gogh self-portrait to Gauguin’s dreamscapes, new studies show that seeing original art can calm stress and boost health

In an era characterised by burnout and doomscrolling, a therapeutic alternative is hanging on a gallery wall. When volunteers at London’s Courtauld Gallery stood before Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear, Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère, and Gauguin’s Te Rerioa, their stress and inflammation levels dropped compared with those of volunteers viewing reproductions. Science suggests that original art is a medicine that one can view rather than swallow.

That art can lift spirits is well known. But that it calms the body is novel. A study by King’s College London asked participants to look at masterworks by 19th-century post-impressionists – Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet and Gauguin – while strapped to sensors. Half the group saw the originals in the gallery, half viewed copies in a lab. The results were clear: going to art galleries is good for you – relieving stress and cutting heart disease risk, as well as boosting the immune system.

The former prince’s retirement from public life is welcome. Problems around royal secrecy and entitlement remain to be tackled

Prince Andrew is no more. Henceforth the king’s younger brother will be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. With the Thursday night announcement, and the news that Mr Mountbatten Windsor will quit his 30-room home in Windsor, the monarch hopes to draw a line under the shame of the former prince’s friendship with the dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and alleged sexual assault of Virginia Giuffre when she was 17, which he has always denied.

These “censures� – as Buckingham Palace termed them – were made necessary by Mr Mountbatten Windsor’s poor judgment and deceit, including the lie that he had broken off contact with Epstein in 2010. But the real damage was done by his grotesquely entitled behaviour and appalling choice of friends. It should not have taken the painful details in Ms Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, an extract of which was published in the Guardian, to make it obvious that the shelter this arrogant man enjoyed had to be removed.

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The world said ‘never again’ after Darfur’s genocide. Yet it stood by as catastrophe loomed

No one can claim they did not know what would happen in El Fasher. An 18-month siege had already seen war crimes by the Rapid Support Forces, including the execution of civilians and sexual violence. Warnings of the massacres that would follow when the city in Darfur fell – as it did on Sunday – were widespread.

The reality was an even darker hell, in the words of UN officials. The World Health Organization says that the RSF killed 460 people in one hospital. Satellite images appear to capture bloodstains on the ground. Footage showed fighters executing unarmed men. Other captives were taken for ransom. The UN says hundreds of civilians and unarmed fighters were raped or killed while trying to flee the city, with clear evidence of ethnically targeted violence. The horrors continue.

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Though the US president’s meeting with Xi Jinping appears to have staved off a global trade war, this is far from a win for Washington

The diverging verdicts offered by the Chinese and American leaders after their talks in South Korea on Thursday reflected more than the chasms between their personal styles and political cultures. Donald Trump gushed about an “amazing� meeting, scoring it 12 out of 10; Xi Jinping reportedly noted that a consensus had been reached, with the two sides needing to finalise follow-up steps rapidly.

Mr Trump’s usual trade approach – shout loudly and wave a big stick – faltered when Beijing raised its own bludgeon. No tribute of gold crowns or Nobel nomination pledges were on offer from Mr Xi. The US president blinked first – but, predictably, attempted to repackage the underwhelming result as a great success.

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Labour must not ignore the warnings contained in the updated index of multiple deprivation

What does it mean for a neighbourhood to be poor? Since the 1970s, the UK government has regularly sought to answer this question by pulling together a range of statistics about the people who live there. The aim is to enable funding to be directed where it is most needed, and to make possible place-based initiatives alongside those aimed at individuals or households.

For a Labour government trailing Reform UK in the polls, the latest data – which is weighted towards income and employment, but also includes health and educational outcomes – should serve as a wake-up call. Virtually all the areas in England either trapped in the “most deprived�, or climbing up the ranks to join them, are in the party’s urban or post-industrial heartlands.

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A new National Audit Office report reveals a sector in crisis. As the needs of an ageing population grow, it must be a wake-up call for the government

England’s first modern hospice, set up with the aim of improving the quality of life of terminally ill people, opened as a charity in south-east London in 1967. Its guiding philosophy was movingly summed up by Cicely Saunders, the nurse, social worker, and physician behind its foundation: “You matter because you are you, you matter to the last moment of your life.�

Since then, through a combination of donations, fundraising efforts and financial assistance from the NHS, the independent hospice movement has become a key element in the UK economy of care. Offering emotional as well as medical support to terminally ill people and those with life-limiting conditions, and delivering services to those who wish to stay in their own homes, hospices are an invaluable social asset. On both sides of the fraught parliamentary debate over the assisted dying bill, the need to ensure that good palliative care is an accessible option for all has been treated as a given.

A $40bn rescue may have helped Javier Milei scrape through midterms, but it leaves Argentina’s democracy and economy more dependent than ever on Washington

Argentina’s rightwing president, Javier Milei, his party and its allies claimed victory this week in key congressional elections. But it was Donald Trump who emerged the biggest winner. A $40bn lifeline from the US president gave Mr Milei’s beleaguered government just enough credibility – and apparent firepower – to halt the Argentinian peso’s slide. Crucially, this helped to stabilise consumer prices in the final weeks of the campaign. The US rescue engendered a short-lived aura of competence that allowed Mr Milei to shift the blame for rising prices back to the opposition, despite his own role in accelerating inflation by devaluing the currency when he took office.

Mr Milei’s wasn’t a decisive triumph. His rightwing coalition got 40% of the midterms vote thanks largely to a low turnout and a fragmented opposition. His “chainsaw� programme of privatisation and public spending cuts has not been popular. Polls suggest that six in 10 voters disapprove. Unsurprising, perhaps: since Mr Milei took office in December 2023, Argentinians’ purchasing power has fallen sharply, real wages have declined and more than 200,000 jobs have been lost.

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