Pep Guardiola’s team have lost four in a row. While they have overcome hurdles before the nature of their problems this season present a fresh challenge

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The danger is always of overreacting. We’ve seen Manchester City have a blip at this stage of the season before. But still, defeat to Brighton on Saturday means that, for the first time in his career as a manager, Pep Guardiola has lost four successive games. It would be extremely premature to suggest the empire is crumbling but, equally, for the first time in a long time there is a sense that City’s aura may be beginning to wane.

But first, some context. One defeat was in the Carabao Cup and another was in the Champions League, where City sit 10th in the table ; even if they do miss out on the top eight who go through to the last 16 automatically – they have Feyenoord (home), Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain (away) and Club Brugge (home) next – they will surely at the very least be in the play-offs. But two of the recent defeats were in the Premier League, away at Bournemouth and then Brighton, and as a result City sit five points behind Liverpool .

This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com , and he’ll answer the best in a future edition

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• Norwegian claims milestone success in 6-1, 7-5 win
• ‘I knew he was maybe dealing with a bit of a cold’

Carlos Alcaraz made a stuttering start to the ATP Finals in Turin as he suffered a shock first career defeat to the world No 7 Casper Ruud.

The two-time Wimbledon champion, who won the first of his four grand slam titles by beating Ruud in the 2022 US Open final, went in to the contest leading the head-to-head results 4-0.

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Trump outperformed his 2016 and 2020 election runs substantially among key groups such as young men and Black people

Donald Trump defied the polls and pundits and received both a majority of the popular vote and of the electoral college. His margin of 3.4 percentage points (thus far) was well beyond anything that anyone projected and it is the first time a Republican candidate for president received a majority of popular votes since 2004. It is probably safe to say that even his own pollsters did not see this tornado coming, otherwise the president-elect’s team would not have issued statements earlier in the day attacking voting irregularities and election tampering. Certainly not if you are expecting to win.

Published polls and the television network-sponsored exit polls both revealed some new truths that help explain what really happened and must be studied by winners and losers, academics and both political strategists and junkies.

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The ultra-wealthy talk about solving the climate crisis or ending inequality. But what they’re really interested in is outliving or escaping anyone poorer than them

Nearly three years ago, I started working on an idea for a book. It started out with the pretty mild proposition: we’re in a class war, but it’s a weird one, because one side is curiously coy. The capital class used to strut its stuff. It used to build libraries and great estates; it used to tell you it thought it was superior, and why. Now that it is billionaires on one side and everyone else on the other, they are like ghosts. They might tell you what they think, in TED talks, at Davos, but it can’t be real: according to them, all they care about is fixing climate change, solving inequality and bringing about world peace. Mysteriously, none of those things ever come about.

I dragged my feet a little bit, and while I did so, the billionaires got louder, and maybe truer to their authentic selves. Vladimir Putin, estimated to be worth billions, invaded Ukraine. Elon Musk bought Twitter. Sam Bankman-Fried got outed as not-a-billionaire – the billions turned out to either belong to someone else, be fictional, be priced in crypto, or all three – and a lot of his fantasies for the future came tumbling out in the same legal proceedings: a plan, stated in a memo, to purchase the sovereign nation of Nauru in order to construct a “bunker/shelter” that would be used for “some event where 50%-99.99% of people die [to] ensure that most EAs [effective altruists] survive” and to develop “sensible regulation around human genetic enhancement, and build a lab there”.

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The Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley returns to Worcester in ‘good condition’ after being checked out in 1973

A book published in 1899 which was 51 years overdue has finally been returned to a public library in Massachusetts .

The book, titled The Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley, was returned to the Worcester public library earlier in November. It had been checked out in 1973, with a due date of 22 May 1973, making its return just more than five decades late.

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Sophie Lloyd was expelled in 1991 for ‘deliberate deception’ after being admitted while pretending to be a man

The council meeting of the Magic Circle on 9 October 1991 was a historic occasion, marking the moment when the first cohort of women, including Debbie McGee and Fay Presto, were admitted to its previously male-only ranks of magicians.

But the meeting was also memorable for another, lesser known, reason. The council voted to expel a member named Raymond Lloyd, who was in fact a woman named Sophie Lloyd, who had been “masquerading as a male” in order to gain access to the society.

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Here is what we know so far about the violence surrounding Maccabi Tel Aviv’s match against Ajax last week

Violence in Amsterdam around a Europa League football match between local team Ajax and Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv sparked global horror, against a backdrop of soaring antisemitic and Islamophobic abuse and attacks across Europe fuelled by the Middle East conflict.

The Amsterdam mayor, Femke Halsema, has said she had not been told the match was high risk. Earlier last week, however, the Turkish club Beşiktaş moved their 28 November match against Maccabi Tel Aviv to a neutral country for fear of “provocative actions”.

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After underwhelming box office for seventh movie in Tom Cruise series, $400m-budgeted next chapter might be last

The trailer for the eighth Mission: Impossible film has been released with a new title that suggests it might be Tom Cruise ’s final mission.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which is set to be released next summer, was originally intended to be the second chapter of 2023’s Dead Reckoning , with a title of Dead Reckoning Part Two.

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In 2023, state was nation’s sole producer of almonds, artichokes, figs, olives, pomegranates, raisins and walnuts

Take a drive through the Salinas or Central valleys in California and you’ll pass from town to town advertising its specialty fruit or vegetable: strawberries in Watsonville, garlic in Gilroy, pistachios in Avenal and almonds in Ripon. More than 400 types of commodities are grown in the Golden state – including a third of the vegetables and three-quarters of the fruits and nuts produced in the United States.

Much of that food is grown by immigrant farmworkers – many of whom are undocumented. According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), about half of the country’s 2.4 million agricultural farm workers do not have legal status in the US. But farm-worker advocates say the number is much higher in places like California, where it can be “as high as 70% in some areas”, according to Alexis Guild, vice-president of strategy and programs at Farmworker Justice, a non-profit based in Washington DC.

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