Many liberal Russians shelter in states once part of the Soviet Union. It’s time that they learned to respect the cultures and languages their nation has so long suppressed

One day in the 1990s, I was playing with my cousin in a local park in Chișinău, the capital of Romanian-speaking Moldova, when two little girls from the Russian-speaking minority asked us what our names were. We told them: Mihai and Maria Paula. They immediately rebaptised us: “ Misha i Masha! ” To them, we were all Russians after all.

In 2024, such expressions of cultural imperialism are still rife in Putin’s Russia, but you wouldn’t expect to find them among Russian liberals, an estimated million of whom left their country after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

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Archbishop of Canterbury urged to quit over failure to pursue John Smyth, who is believed to have abused about 130 boys

The archbishop of Canterbury is under growing pressure to resign over failures to pursue a sadistic abuser of children when allegations were brought to his attention.

Members of the Church of England’s ruling body, the General Synod, have launched a petition calling on Justin Welby to quit, “given his role in allowing abuse to continue”.

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Singer describes recent meeting where Simon said he was offended by an old interview, and pair reconciled

Art Garfunkel has described a recent tearful reunion with Paul Simon, in which the pair moved past old enmities.

Speaking to the Times , Garfunkel said: “I actually had lunch with Paul a couple of weeks back. First time we’d been together in many years. I looked at Paul and said, ‘What happened? Why haven’t we seen each other?’ Paul mentioned an old interview where I said some stuff. I cried when he told me how much I had hurt him. Looking back, I guess I wanted to shake up the nice guy image of Simon & Garfunkel. Y’know what? I was a fool!

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The so-called corpse plant takes a decade to flower – and when it does, the blossom lasts just 24-48 hours and smells of rotting flesh

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I’ve never smelt the rotting decay of a corpse, but I’m told it would smell something like the slightly phallic endangered flower on display at Geelong’s botanic gardens.

The smell of the so-called corpse plant, or amorphophallus titanum , for those playing at home, hits you like a punch in the face – even from 20 metres away.

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Comments by John Healey come as Starmer is in Paris to meet Macron and discuss implications of Trump’s victory

Good morning. Keir Starmer is in Paris this morning for talks with the French president, Emmanuel Macron. The prime minister is visiting to attend the French Armistice Day service, but the real interest will lie in what the leaders of Europe’s two biggest military powers have to say as they discuss the implications of Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.

Here is Jessica Elgot ’s overnight preview story.

Donald Trump spoke on the phone with Vladimir Putin on Thursday and discussed the war in Ukraine, the Washington Post reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The US president-elect advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of “Washington’s sizeable military presence in Europe”, the Post reported.

Ukraine is certainly under pressure. Russia is certainly escalating, and President Trump has reportedly told Putin and warned him against further escalation. If he’s done that, he’s right to do so.

Russia is escalating with massing North Korean troops on their territory. It’s escalating with more than 2,000 one-way attack kamikaze drones aimed at Kyiv and the rest of the Ukrainian cities in the last month alone. And one person is responsible for that escalation, and that’s Putin.

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A journey across the US in a convertible that holds some secrets – like a coffin welded into the boot – as a teenager seeks out his father

TJ (Finn Haney) has just turned 18 when a mysterious stranger turns up with a present from his absentee father. The gift turns out to be the keys to a 1968 convertible; a lovely surprise, but perhaps lovelier if it wasn’t falling apart and didn’t have a coffin-like box welded to the floor of the boot. He’s also given a time and an address hundreds of miles away, of when and where he will meet his father after many years. This is the setup for a sentimental and fairly low-key road trip following a fairly classic call-to-adventure odyssey structure, of the sort made in their dozens during the US indie film-making boom of the 1990s.

There’s something refreshing (or passe, depending on personal preference) about seeing a film made today starring a teenage lead character who is so unashamedly earnest. TJ, with his wide-eyed optimism tempered with the pain of parental rejection, recalls the likes of Dawson, he of the eponymous creek. Like Dawson, he’s an aspiring film-maker, and lines like, “Everyone has their own path to follow and mine is wherever PTA says it is,” are of course pretty cringe. But you know what? So are teenagers; not enough onscreen teens are authentically naff. It wouldn’t work however, if it wasn’t balanced with the emotional truth of TJ’s feelings about his dad, which aren’t embarrassing but raw and painful: “He didn’t even call me. He just didn’t want me.”

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Voluntary standards proposed at Cop16 focus on keeping offsets strictly local, while critics call the issue a ‘distraction’

International biodiversity offsetting “doesn’t work”, according to experts aiming to create a nature market that avoids the pitfalls of carbon offsets.

The biodiversity sector has been circling the idea of a credits market that would allow companies to finance restoration and preservation of biodiversity, deliver “net-positive” gains for nature, and help plug the $700bn (£540bn) funding gap.

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With $1tn a year needed, we analyse how best to fill the gap, from wealth taxes to levies on flying and oil extraction

Countries meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the Cop29 climate summit are under pressure to find ways to raise money to help poorer nations cut greenhouse gas emissions, shift to a low-carbon economy, and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather.

At least $1tn a year is needed. Developed countries are willing to ensure about half of that is provided from public sources, leaving a large gap that countries are hoping to fill with other sources of cash, known as innovative forms of finance .

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The Canadian psychologist’s zealous exegesis of the Bible as a moral rulebook for life is long-winded and out of touch

There is an oddly entertaining, if largely unenlightening, debate available online between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson, two big beasts of the performing sage circuit. They discuss the Bible, or more specifically, Peterson’s latest study of its contents in his new book, We Who Wrestle With God .

Dawkins, looking increasingly bemused, quietly but repeatedly asks Peterson if he really believes in the virgin birth or whether Cain and Abel actually existed, and Canada’s best-known controversial psychologist responds with a series of ever more excitable exegeses of the biblical text.

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