• Updates from the group stage climax in Turin
• Kyrgios to return | You can email Katy here

Tim Joyce’s piece on the wise-beyond-her-years Coco Gauff is well worth a read too:

Meanwhile at the Billie Jean King Cup Finals, Britain get their campaign under way later against Germany, with Emma Raducanu set to make her return from injury after nearly two months out. Our tennis correspondent Tumaini Carayol is in Malaga:

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Appointment of vaccine critic knocks some of world’s biggest drugmakers including Moderna, AstraZeneca and GSK

• Who is RFK Jr and what are his likely top priorities?
• Business live – latest updates

Investors in pharmaceutical companies are selling off stock after Donald Trump nominated the anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr to lead the US Department of Health and Human Services.

RFK Jr has embraced numerous health-related conspiracy theories, and is one of the most persistent and influential vaccine deniers in the US.

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As the Post Office Horizon inquiry ends, Gary Lineker steps aside and Donald Trump makes some mad picks

More than four years after it was established, the Post Office Horizon inquiry is finally coming to an end. Though despite a hard-hitting interim report and a game-changing (for public awareness) ITV drama, most post office operators are still waiting for their compensation. Leading campaigner Alan Bates recently wrote to Keir Starmer to ask what was going on. Twice. His first letter went unanswered. Despite having allocated £1.8bn for compensation in the budget, progress has been glacially slow. One of the last people to give evidence this week was Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, who as business secretary from early 2023 to July this year had overall responsibility for the responsibility. Most witnesses to the inquiry have begun by saying how sorry they are for the scandal, even if they have been later at pains to point out it was nothing to do with them. There was no such statement from Kemi. She is not one of Westminster’s natural empaths. Rather, she wanted to make clear she had done all she could to expedite things by writing to Jeremy Hunt suggesting that he offer £100k to all claimants. Despite the then chancellor turning her down on the grounds that it might not offer a fair deal to taxpayers, Kemi placed the blame for the holdups on the civil service. Nor could Kemi explain why she made no subsequent efforts to free up compensation over the following 12 months. Not even another letter.

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Subtle high-fives were exchanged and remarks about the impending success of the next four years were whispered around

When we walked into school on the morning of 6 November, we exchanged quick glances with the other girls in our social circle – looks filled with uncertainty and dread about the future. Because we are applying to colleges all around the country and about to leave our homes in the Hudson Valley, political issues suddenly have begun to feel a lot more personal.

Access to abortion and contraception, protection of the environment, and the growing hate and violence toward marginalized groups all have the potential to greatly impact our lives. We had only brief conversations about why Trump’s victory felt so defeating, but our shared disappointment stuck with us as we walked to our first period classes.

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Factory International, Manchester
A mix of beat poetry, opera, communal screaming, TikTok and tai chi, Anderson’s state-of-the-nation work is occasionally poignant but mostly baffling

Ai Weiwei is God, Elon Musk is the devil, the Doomsday Clock is ticking, atomic bombs are exploding and the audience are screaming their lungs out. And that is just a fraction of Laurie Anderson’s sprawling and discombobulating Ark: United States V. It is a mix of music, cinema, opera and performance that, according to Anderson, tells “stories moving through myth, journalism, fable and TikTok, conjuring alternate realities and stories from my own life. Part ruminations, part long-form poems.” It’s “a large-scale portrait of a country … asking questions about democracy, war and freedom”.

If that sounds muddy on paper then it doesn’t get any clearer on stage. This three-hour multimedia performance is part beat poetry biography backed by an instrumental avant-jazz duo, part AI-generated film, part Ted Talk, part biblical allegory, part who knows what. At one point Anderson instructs the audience to scream for 10 seconds (quite fun), based on Yoko Ono’s response to the election. Then the Velvet Underground song Ocean is spun into a bit on rising sea levels, though it fails to harness the crashing, cascading power of the original.

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The Washington Post’s Will Lewis said the paper was returning to its ‘roots’ by not endorsing a presidential candidate. There was more to it than that

Postmortems continue for who lost Kamala Harris the US election, and these will be consequential for the left in the UK. However many times the US flags that the “special relationship” is really not a thing for them any more, their politics bears down on ours, whether it’s rightwing narratives travelling from the Heritage Foundation to the thinktanks at Tufton Street , via [checks notes], oh yes, money, or the centre left here praying they can sail past the Democrats’ shipwrecks.

If consensus is reached that the problem was “go woke; go broke” – that Harris was too inclusive, too pro-trans, too pro-diversity, generally speaking, not horrible enough – that would be multiple kinds of erroneous, the greatest of which is moral. It lacks backbone to diagnose the problem as “too strong on the values of humanity and universalism”, and solve it by abandoning those values. Amusingly, the message Labour has taken, so far, isn’t even that the Dems were too woke – rather, that they were just too hopeful , a reading which is a little like avoiding the shipwreck by drowning yourself.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian journalist

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Until the 1960s it rained a lot. We ate wild game, fish, there were plenty of rivers, but since then they’ve been drying up. This is José’s story

Location São João das Missões, Brazil

Disaster Xakriabá Indigenous territory drought, 2013-24

José Fiuza Xakriabá grew up in the Xakriabá Indigenous territory and is now an influential Xakriabá leader. That region was previously watered by an extensive network of rivers. But the only stream that still flows in the surrounding area is now the Itacarambi . The trend of increasing drought in Minas Gerais state started in the 1970s and is caused by rising temperatures. Scientific research has shown that droughts have been the worst in at least 700 years and are mostly the result of human-caused global heating.

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Novelist Louisa Young will write the sixth, seventh and eighth books in a move that ‘will thrill existing readers’

Elizabeth Jane Howard’s much-loved Cazalet Chronicles series will be continued by her niece, it has been announced.

Novelist Louisa Young will write the sixth, seventh and eighth books in the series, which follows the fortunes of the upper middle class Cazalet family.

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I’ve seen calmer hokey cokeys

Fantômas , a new restaurant in Chelsea, is named after one of France’s most famous fictional antiheroes: think the Scarlet Pimpernel meets Dexter with a large dose of James Bond baddie. Or at least that’s what I gather – to the British ear, the name just sounds archly gothic. And that’s quite in keeping with this capacious, glamorous and sparsely lit joint, where the music is loud (tribal house, or thereabouts, in case you’re wondering) and a statuesque beauty in a tailored leather gown walks you from the front curtain to your table, before handing you over to a server. Well, make that servers plural, because they are legion here.

This place is a collaboration between chef Chris Denney, formerly of Fiend and 108 Garage , and George Bukhov-Weinstein and Ilya Demichev, the pair who in 2014 caused chaos on the London dining scene when they opened Beast , a similarly Bram Stoker-ish spot in a crypt that served only gigantic king crab, steak and chunks of aged parmesan with rocket. Prices started at about £100 a head, which at the time felt like a lot for surf, turf and some cheese with the devil’s lettuce. Little did we know back then that £100 would be roughly the bill for a minor blowout at Pret nowadays.

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