So far, the president-elect’s rhetoric has been at odds with reality. If that changes, it would redraw the US electoral map

Donald Trump’s unpredictable style and electoral success reflect a turbulent era when neither progressives nor authoritarians have secured control. Far from signalling an autocratic takeover, his rise shows a political landscape in flux. The 2008 crash and its uneven recovery marked the decline of the old economic order. But in 2016, the rise of Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left highlighted a real shift, as neoliberalism’s grip loosened, making space for once marginalised ideas.

Since then, two US presidencies have acknowledged the need to rebuild an economy that supports blue-collar workers affected by free trade, immigration and globalisation. While neither administration succeeded – and paid for it at the ballot box – the result has been a growing constituency on both sides of the American political divide that takes seriously, albeit often rhetorically, economic injustice . But for any political movement to become dominant, it has to shape the core ideas that matter to everyone, not just its diehard supporters.

An Under-20 World Cup winner with Portugal, Angel Gomes’s father recalls his unique journey in football

Where do you begin with the extraordinary football heritage of Angel Gomes? Perhaps in Lille, where he is thriving in the Champions League, having left Manchester United in 2020 . Alternatively you could go back to Lisbon, where his father, Gil, arrived as a 15-year-old to make his way in the world with Benfica, trained with Eusébio and won an Under-20 World Cup with Portugal.

Or, you could return to Luanda, Angola, where Gil was born and raised and learned the game playing barefoot on dirt pitches. However you tell the tale, the rich cast of characters that feature along the way, from Eusébio to Ron Atkinson, Sven-Göran Eriksson to Luís Figo, is astonishing.

Jobless rate rises to 4.3% while wage growth excluding bonuses is at a two-year low

The job market figures come after the government set out tax increases in the budget, including a rise in employer national insurance contributions (NICs) which business leaders say could hit hiring and pay increases.

Paul Daley at Capital Economics added:

Even though the rise in pay growth in September will probably be followed by a bigger gain in October, as the new public sector pay deals start, the easing in private sector regular pay suggests that the Bank of England will continue to cut interest rates gradually. We continue to think the Bank will skip the December meeting and cut rates at the following February meeting.

The labour market continues to loosen, with vacancies dropping further, though still slightly above pre-pandemic levels. The unemployment rate also ticked up slightly to 4.3%.

But wage growth is proving to be a little more persistent. Annual growth in employee’s total earnings is up to 4.3%, reflecting the civil service one-off payments made in the summer. Despite a loosening labour market, nominal pay growth remains in excess of the circa 3% level that is considered to be consistent with the Bank’s 2% inflation target. Real pay continues to grow given that inflationary pressures have fallen back at a faster pace than wage growth.

Growth in pay excluding bonuses eased again this month to its lowest rate in over two years. Pay growth including bonuses increased, but for recent periods these figures have been affected by last year’s one-off payments made to public sector workers.

Job vacancies have fallen again, as they have been doing for more than two years now. However, the total still remains a little above where it was before the pandemic.

Oil and gas company had challenged 2021 ruling that it must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030

Shell has won its appeal against a landmark climate ruling in the Netherlands, which in 2021 ordered the oil and gas company to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Shell had appealed against a lower court ruling in 2021 that it must cut its global carbon emissions by 45% by the end of 2030 compared with 2019 levels.

An irascible priest loses his patience with a newcomer to Hong Kong’s funeral traditions in punchy melodrama of a film

Starting out as a prickly comedy in which wedding planner Dominic (Hong Kong standup icon Dayo Wong) switches to the funeral business, The Last Dance takes a sudden sombre turn. Dominic lands a seemingly unhinged client, turned down by all his competitors, who wants him to embalm her young son. As a string of putrefied matter hangs from the boy’s back while he is dressing him, Dominic realises he has already been dead for six months. It’s not the only mortician scene – and not the only note of unsettling realism with which writer-director Anselm Chan ballasts this well-constructed and punchy melodrama.

Bequeathed the funeral agent gig by his girlfriend’s retiring uncle, Dominic must get to grips with his new business partner: ball-breaking Taoist priest Master Man (Michael Hui), who performs the “breaking hell’s gate” rites that liberate departing souls. The veteran is unimpressed by the commercially oriented newcomer, who is so keen on flashy gimmicks that he commissions a paper Maserati for the funeral of someone who died in a car crash. It becomes apparent, though, that Man’s traditionalism is covering up his own grief and leads to his unbending treatment of anyone in his vicinity.

The end to this bloody stalemate must come with negotiation, and Putin should not wait until Trump is in the White House

First the good news. The US is talking to Russia. Then the bad. Vladimir Putin has been phoned not by the current US president, but by a known admirer and sceptic of the US’s support for Ukraine, the president-elect, Donald Trump. Could these two facts offer a path to peace?

Two years ago, Putin made a terrible mistake. He thought he could invade Ukraine and topple its leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He failed utterly. Ukraine’s forces pushed him back to the supposedly pro-Russian territory of his 2014 invasion. At talks in Istanbul months after this failure, Putin’s representatives might have settled for a ceasefire and the acceptance of some western security guarantee for Kyiv. The talks broke down with the west encouraging Ukraine to fight on. In what amounted to a proxy war on Moscow, the west attacked Russia and its people with the severest sanctions ever seen, while donating to Ukraine huge sums of aid.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Odd-looking creatures called ciona are naturally rich in protein and one company aims to farm and process them for the table

At a seaside restaurant near the docks in Fredrikstad, Norway, there’s a selection of delicious looking entrees sitting in front of me. There is a cheesy lasagne, a savoury Mexican casserole, and a spicy chilli con carne . Biting in to each one in turn, I savour the familiar taste of ground beef. Or is it?

The dishes come from Pronofa Asa, a Scandinavian company whose purpose is to make new and sustainable protein sources. In 2022, it acquired the Swedish research company Marine Taste and expanded on its work turning ciona – or “sea squirts” to you and me – into mincemeat. The dishes in Fredrikstad were prototypes, but Pronofa plans to have its mincemeat on supermarket shelves in Norway and Sweden before the end of the year, it says, and will aim to expand throughout Europe in the coming years.

Set during Liz Truss’s premiership, Coe’s multilayered novel is a mixture of whodunnit and political chronicle with a villain hiding in plain sight

My favourite joke in Jonathan Coe’s new novel is hardly a side-splitter, more what someone of my acquaintance would label “Radio 4 funny, not funny-funny”. In fact, it might not even be intended as a joke at all, though longtime fans of the author of What a Carve Up! will have their suspicions. A memoirist called Brian is recalling a mesmerisingly beautiful young woman he encountered as a student at Cambridge. “‘I heard her described variously as ‘elfin’, as ‘eldritch’,” he tells us, adding that “eldritch” is the word used by a minor character in the book, Tommy Cope, who is “always reaching for the slightly more recondite adjective”. The subtle joke being that “recondite” is itself pretty, well, recondite.

Cope himself features rarely, though his comic purpose as a Coe stand-in is clear. “He came from the Midlands and he was studying English literature and he was another grammar-school boy,” explains Brian of Cope/Coe (in a novel containing numerous word games, the author has literally taken the “p”); and he is also strikingly quiet and nondescript. Brian continues: “However, it turned out that he had also been writing short stories and even novels, which he began to publish in the years after we’d graduated. Much to the surprise of us all, some of them turned out to be mildly satirical in nature, and furthermore to suggest an interest in politics, something of which he’d never given any of us the least inkling when he was a student. I don’t really follow these things, but I was told that one of them – a sophomore effort under the title Quite the Mash-Up – achieved what in literary circles is known as a ‘modest success’. Who knew.”

After escaping civil war in Nigeria, the ‘outsider’ photographer moved to the UK to capture Black queer self-expression. A new exhibition explores his legacy