Files reveal a world of flattery and fratboy tones, where rich men are cultivated and women provide services

Pluck an email at random from the millions in the Department of Justice’s Epstein Library. It is a Saturday evening in February 2013, and Jeffrey Epstein is messaging Bill Gates’s assistant about guests for a dinner he wants to organise.

“People for Bill,” the email begins. Epstein starts listing possible candidates: the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, the film director Woody Allen, the prime minister of Qatar, a couple of Harvard academics, the billionaire CEO of Hyatt hotels, a White House communications director, a former US secretary of defence.

With polls and membership at an all-time high, the Green party are having a moment – and it’s largely down to their charismatic (if slightly cheesy) new leader. Can he really pull off a socialist revolution?

17 JANUARY 2026

A stunning curtain-raiser was a fitting celebration of the host country and the Games – with wider messages never far from the surface

This was an opening ceremony for the ages: effortlessly chic, bewitching and divine. Milan simultaneously delivered a three-hour love letter to Italy, and a plea for hope and harmony in a fractious world.

But not everyone in the 60,000 crowd at San Siro was listening. As the United States team, led by the speedskater Erin Jackson, made its way across the stadium it was loudly applauded. But then the TV cameras panned to the US vice-president, JD Vance, and his wife, Usha, and the cheers turned to loud boos.

They offer independence, reduce emissions and congestion. But they are also endangering lives

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After the Sydney Harbour Bridge was swarmed by 40 or so ebikes and e-motorcycles on Wednesday, the Australian government said the country faced a “real emergency”.

“[Illegal ebikes] are a total menace on the road,” the health minister, Mark Butler, said on Friday.

Marius Borg Høiby pleads not guilty in court while pressure mounts against his crown princess mother over Epstein friendship

There will be little to celebrate when Norway’s King Harald, Europe’s oldest reigning monarch, turns 89 later this month.

Two multigenerational crises have rocked the institution, causing its popularity to dip in polls of Norwegians and bringing a public glare that far exceeds that of previous scandals.

Jack Thorne takes on William Golding – and you’ll never have felt so grateful to live under the rule of law, that ultimate dweeb’s charter

Castaway stories, from Cast Away to The Martian, often make for feelgood classics. They are tales about an ingenious individual overcoming huge odds, a triumphant metaphor for the human spirit. Here’s a funny thing: castaway stories featuring large groups of people lead to the exact opposite. Forced to self-organise, they end up eating each other. The exception is Lost; I don’t know what that was about. Polar bears?

Needless to say, I like them all. So it’s exciting to see a new kid on the block – or rather an old boy. William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, about a group of British schoolboys who crash-land on a desert island, has been part of the UK curriculum for more than 60 years. I wonder if we forget the books we’re forced to study, and are obliged to rediscover them in later life. I know this story well, but am not sure I can say I fully experienced it until this striking new BBC version (Sunday, 9pm, BBC One).

Exclusive: Material gathered was personally given to Josh Simons when director of pro-Starmer thinktank, say sources

A Labour minister commissioned and reviewed a report in 2023 on journalists investigating the thinktank that would help propel Keir Starmer to power, the Guardian has learned.

The research was paid for and subsequently reviewed by Josh Simons, now a minister in the Cabinet Office, when he was director of Labour Together, according to sources and documents seen by the Guardian.

Former prime minister says revelations about Epstein’s influence on UK politics caused him revulsion

• Brown: We owe it to victims and British democracy to demand change

Gordon Brown has said he deeply regrets bringing Peter Mandelson into his government, and that revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s influence on UK politics had caused him revulsion.

Writing in the Guardian, Brown said the news that Mandelson was passing information to Epstein while he was business secretary was “a betrayal of everything we stand for as a country”.

Only a smattering of Republicans spoke out about clip in which Obamas’ faces were superimposed on bodies of apes

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Donald Trump said on Friday evening, after a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes had been posted to his social media account and then deleted, that he had directed aides to post the offensive video but that he hadn’t seen that portion of the clip and he refused to apologize for it.

The clip appeared during one of the 79-year-old US president’s increasingly frequent late-night posting sprees to his Truth Social account, and shows the laughing faces of the former president and first lady superimposed on the bodies of primates in a jungle setting, bobbing to the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

Bill Clinton says closed-door depositions would be akin to ‘kangaroo court’ as Hillary Clinton says they have already told House committee what they know

Former US president Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary are calling for their congressional testimony on ties to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to be held publicly, to prevent Republicans from politicising the issue.

Both Clintons had been ordered to give closed-door depositions before the House of Representatives’ oversight committee, which is investigating the deceased financier’s connections to powerful figures and how information about his crimes was handled.