To navigate the dangerous new era, Keir Starmer must end the culture of denial around the biggest strategic mistake of modern times

The 35th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down was not commemorated much in Britain last weekend. It is no Poppy Day. The unravelling of the iron curtain doesn’t compete with Remembrance Sunday for cultural resonance. But it is more relevant to the world we live in today. More poignant, too, now that Americans have chosen a president who is no friend of what used to be called the west .

Few world leaders will be gladder to see Donald Trump return to the White House than the former KGB officer who sits in the Kremlin, craving vengeance for his Soviet motherland’s humiliating defeat in the cold war.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

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Trump recruits pro-settler figure Mike Huckabee, and will also put Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of a new department of government efficiency

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Sharon Horgan’s follow-up to her stunning revenge comedy is darker – and far less charming for it. The plots are a rambling mess and, despite stellar performances, it all feels morose

Usually, the return of a great TV series is cause for celebration. In the case of Bad Sisters, it’s cause for a fair amount of scepticism – and a sliver of hope. That’s because the Dublin-set whodunnit’s original run – a stunningly engineered split-timeline story of ultimate revenge against an abusive husband (a mesmerisingly monstrous Claes Bang) – was so perfectly self-contained. We knew from the start that John Paul – married to the guileless Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), and the bane of her four sisters’ lives – was dead, but not why. We witnessed Grace’s siblings repeatedly fail to murder the man they’d rechristened The Prick – while, in the present day, Claffin & Sons insurers tried to avoid a pay-out by proving the women had killed him – yet we were kept in the dark about his actual fate until the end, when it was revealed that Grace herself had done the deed. After striking a deal with the Claffins to keep quiet, the series ended euphorically – with a punch of cosmic justice and a sense of hard-won liberation.

Bad Sisters worked exceptionally well as a one-off, both in structural terms and as a fascinatingly idiosyncratic piece of TV, managing to pepper a profound and horrifying study of coercive control with hilarity. Plot-wise, it stuck close to the original 2012 Belgian series – which, tellingly, never attempted a follow-up. Yet for certain streamers, hits are clearly only there to be built on. I was praying that Sharon Horgan – who co-created the show and stars as eldest sister Eva – would manage to magic up a similarly clever storyline for season two. Sadly, it wasn’t to be.

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Smyth moved to South Africa after he was barred from re-entering Zimbabwe, where he abused boys at summer camps

The evangelical Christian barrister John Smyth abused as many 130 boys and young men in the UK, Zimbabwe and possibly other African countries but an independent review has said there remains little concrete information on his time in South Africa.

The review into the Anglican church’s handling of Smyth’s abuses said he might have been brought to justice had Justin Welby, who on Tuesday announced he would step down as archbishop of Canterbury , formally reported him to the police when he found out in 2013.

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When he woke up with chest pains, his wife, Lucille, called 999, expecting help to arrive in minutes. But as he drifted in and out of consciousness, their wait continued ...

On the evening of 15 March 2022, Lucille and Dave Strachan had supper in their north Wales home, watched their favourite TV show, Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly, then went upstairs to bed. Apart from one bout of food poisoning in the 1970s, Dave had never been ill before. But at about 11.20pm he woke up and told Lucille he had chest pains and difficulty breathing.

Lucille called their daughter Hilary, a doctor, before dialling 999 and asking for an ambulance. Was Dave breathing, the call operator asked. Yes, but he has chest pains and he’s cold, said Lucille. The call operator asked her to monitor Dave, to tell them every time he took a breath, information which was then fed into a computer.

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After decades among the hidden homeless, Dominic Van Allen dug himself a bunker beneath a public park. But his life would get even more precarious. By Tom Lamont

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Questions raised over influence after 1,261 business and industry delegates registered for biodiversity summit in Colombia

Record numbers of business representatives and lobbyists had access to the UN’s latest biodiversity talks, analysis shows.

In total 1,261 business and industry delegates registered for Cop16 in Cali, Colombia, which ended in disarray and without significant progress on a number of key issues including nature funding, monitoring biodiversity loss and work on reducing environmentally harmful business subsidies.

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Party documents police failings to intervene in incidents involving opponents of Shabana Mahmood during elections

Police failed to intervene when the family of Shabana Mahmood, now the justice secretary, and her supporters faced intimidation during this year’s general election campaign, Labour has told the elections watchdog.

In a document seen by the Guardian, party officials said officers from West Midlands police left the count on polling day before Mahmood, a close ally of Keir Starmer, and members of her family were barracked by political opponents in the seat of Birmingham Ladywood.

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Fast fashion retailer did not appear in list of clients published by Global Counsel, co-founded by Labour peer

Peter Mandelson’s consultancy Global Counsel advised the Chinese fast fashion company Shein until earlier this year, the Guardian can disclose.

The retail company contracted Global Counsel until earlier in 2024, though it never appeared on Global Counsel’s list of clients published by the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists (ORCL).

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