Anarchist chronicler of ‘Paraguayan sorrow’ – once known only in radical Latin American circles – is finally being recognized in his adopted country and has now been translated into English

When the Spanish anarchist writer Rafael Barrett was smuggled back into Paraguay near the small town of Yabebyry in 1909, he was unrecognisable as the young newspaper correspondent who had arrived in the troubled nation five years earlier to cover an armed revolution.

Physically, he was being consumed by a tuberculosis infection that would kill him the following year. Ideologically, he had been transformed by immersion in what he called “Paraguayan sorrow”, shedding the remnants of his youth in Madrid’s bourgeois elite to embrace anarchism and the labour movement.

Hundreds turn up at Hampshire industrial estate to grab cut-price cast-iron cookware

One hundred years after two Belgian industrialists first “cracked the code” to enamelling cast-iron and created the first Le Creuset cocotte, the highly covetable cookware brand continues to grace the middle-class kitchen.

With prices reflecting its status, however, fans are always on the lookout for bargains for the colourful range, which is still made in the original foundry established in 1925 in the village of Fresnoy-le-Grand, about two hours north of Paris.

Inter midfielder never fails from 12 yards. This weekend he did – and now the top of the table is tighter than ever

Would it be too dramatic to portray a November missed penalty as a sign to let go of everything we thought we knew about the Serie A title race? Well, yes, OK, probably it would. But seeing Hakan Calhanoglu’s spot-kick carom back off a post in the second-half of Inter’s 1-1 draw with Napoli was at the least a shock to the system.

He had converted all his previous 19 attempts since joining the Nerazzurri from Milan in 2021. “It had to happen sooner or later,” said the player. Were the rest of us ready, though, to live in a world shorn of such certainties? As the commentator Patrick Kendrick put it: “With Calhanoglu missing, we’re just left with the misery of death and taxes”.

A Dutch publisher has announced that it will use AI to translate some of its books – but those in the industry are worried about the consequences if this becomes the norm

As anyone who has tried pointing their phone’s camera at a menu in a foreign country lately will know, machine translation has improved rapidly since the first days of Google Translate. The utility of AI-powered translation in situations like this is unquestionable – but the proposed use of AI in literary translation has been significantly more controversial.

Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning’s announcement that it would use AI translation for commercial fiction has outraged both authors and translators – despite attempts to reassure them with promises that no books will be translated in this way without careful checking and that authors will have to give consent.

Tom Homan has previously said he would ‘run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen’

US president-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday that Tom Homan , the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), will be in charge of the country’s borders in his new administration.

Homan’s areas of control will include “the southern border, the northern border, all maritime, and aviation security”, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform. Trump added that “border czar” Homan will be in charge of the deportation of illegal immigrants .

Workers face being targets in what could be Environmental Protection Agency’s biggest upheaval since its founding

After several years of recovery after the tumult of Donald Trump’s last administration, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is now bracing itself for even deeper cuts to staff numbers and to work protecting Americans from pollution and the climate crisis as Trump prepares to return to the White House.

When he was last president, Trump gutted more than 100 environmental rules and vowed to only leave a “little bit of the EPA” left “because you can’t destroy business”, prompting hundreds of agency staff to leave amid a firestorm of political interference and retaliation against civil servants. An even greater exodus is expected this time, with staff fearing they are frontline targets in what could be the biggest upheaval in the agency’s 50-year history.

I need my own space and have a limited tolerance for human company … Might I actually be a moggy?

The only time I have ever mentioned my bird-lover’s slight – slight! – ambivalence towards cats in a public forum, it brought me the angriest virtual postbag of my career, so I hesitate to even mention them again. Cats are great! I feed my neighbours’ cat! My niece is a cat! (By which I mean I view my best friend’s cat as a niece-like figure; she is not a child identifying as a cat , a phenomenon some highly suggestible sections of the media got overheated about several news cycles ago.)

But I’m daring to mention felines after reading an interview with a French veterinary psychiatrist in the New York Times. Over “aperitifs in a cafe not far from the Eiffel Tower” (you can see why he chose to specialise in psychiatry – kir royale with the NYT sounds nicer than expressing a pug’s anal glands), Claude Béata explained what cats, who “like to keep themselves to themselves”, went through during lockdown.

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

Fantastic performances from the leads – you can practically hear the eggshells cracking as Ridley tiptoes around the vanities and insecurities of husband Shazad Latif

The post Star Wars trajectory is a mixed bag for actors. Maybe you get lucky, go the Harrison Ford route and become one of the shiniest movie stars of your generation. Maybe you’re more of a Mark Hamill type – initially out in the cold, before carving out a niche (in Hamill’s case as a sought after voice actor) and going on to cult success. Carrie Fisher, of course, was always a bit cooler than the entire endeavour, and continued her work as a writer, as well as dazzling in a variety of independent films. With Magpie, Daisy Ridley, who starred as Rey in the most recent round of George Lucas’ space opera, subtly signals that she would very much like to sit at Fisher’s table, please – by developing the story of this new independent thriller, working with writer Tom Bateman and director Sam Yates to make it a reality.

Ridley plays Anette, a mum to two children, one a babe in arms, and the other, bright young Tilly (Hiba Ahmed), a child actor. The kids are lovely, but hubby Ben (Shazad Latif) is an absolute arsehole; touchy, negative, checked out, irritable, he’s the sort of guy who never once asks Anette how her day went, but gets the hump if she doesn’t pander to his every emotional need. And then when she does pander to him, he gets annoyed by her pandering. Ben is a novelist, but not a wildly successful one, and there’s clearly a part of him that blames her on some level for this as well. You can practically hear the eggshells cracking as Anette tiptoes around his various vanities and insecurities.

A cracking weeknight supper packed with flavour and ‘mouth-fragrance’

I might be exaggerating, but to nine-year-old me it felt like 5,000 fishes. In 1982, there was a BBC1 TV show called Pebble Mill at One, which featured Glynn Christian as its pioneering TV chef, who I think paved the way for the likes of Keith Floyd and all the celebrity chefs who followed. Glynn used to cook privately for my parents’ business partners, and through this connection my brother Al got his 15 minutes of fame at the age of 13. I don’t remember the whys and wherefores; I just knew that he was going to cook on the television! I don’t know if there was a brief, but my pa decided that Al should cook a fish dish: namely golden pan-fried fish with ginger and spring onions. The Chinese characters for this dish translate literally as “fried, sealed fish”, which loses all of its poetry, but what it lacks in translation, it makes up for in flavour.

My father is not a soft taskmaster, so for weeks running up to the event, he must have made Al cook this dish every night, sometimes even twice a night, until he was satisfied that he had perfected the technique. He would stand behind Al, watching critically over his shoulder. The ginger was too fine, then not fine enough. The spring onions were cut unevenly. The fish was cooked, but not golden – the heat was too low; the fish was golden but not cooked – the heat was too high. I remember the focus, the concentration, the single-mindedness of those cooking sessions, and it felt as if we were having to eat 5,000 fishes in a month.

Amy Poon is the founder of the Chinese heritage food brand Poon’s London . Rachel returns next week.

The Guardian aims to publish recipes for sustainable fish. Check ratings in your region: UK ; Australia ; US .