On the anniversary of his death aged 69, stars from Sigourney Weaver to Sharleen Spiteri, Tom Felton to Harriet Walter, remember the wit, charm and endless generosity of one of Britain’s best-loved actors

Ruby Wax

South East Water blames bad weather as pubs are forced to close, toilets overflow and people go without showers

As the residents of Tunbridge Wells trudged down their sodden high street in the pouring rain, the idea that they had run out of water – for the second time in just a few weeks – seemed farcical.

At the end of November the local water treatment centre, which had been flagged as at risk by the regulator in 2024, was forced to shut down, leaving 24,000 households without water for two weeks. The Drinking Water Inspectorate later said this outage was foreseen and was due to a lack of maintenance at the site.

Ras ‘Ein al ‘Auja is a small community of about 135 families – and the only one remaining in this part of the Jordan valley

Five decades in the south Jordan valley were ending in a day, and Mahmoud Eshaq struggled to hold back his tears. The 55-year-old had not cried since he was a boy, but as he dismantled the family home and prepared to flee the village where his whole life had played out, he was overwhelmed by grief.

While Eshaq’s children loaded mattresses, a fridge, sacks of flour and suitcases of clothes into a truck, masked soldiers escorted a teenage Israeli shepherd down the main village road, where he posed for photos on his donkey, flashing a V sign.

He had threatened her, locked her up and absconded with one of their daughters. Palmer knew she and her girls needed to escape – but it would involve huge risk and total reinvention

In the summer of 1989, Karen Palmer bought a used car for cash, filled it with belongings – some clothes, toys, one pot, one pan and a shoebox of photos – and “disappeared” with her new husband and two young daughters. She didn’t tell her mother, her friends or her neighbours where she was going. She gave no notice to her employers and landlord, leaving items out on her apartment balcony as a sign she still lived there.

“I have such a clear memory of the day we left Los Angeles,” says Palmer. “It was this weird combination of fear and exhilaration, heart pounding, driving into the unknown.” Palmer was fleeing her ex-husband, Gil, the man she feared, and the father of her two daughters, Erin and Amy, then seven and three.

A murderous Clockwork-Orangey gang take on the zombies in this gruesome and energised fourquel. It’s the finest of the 28 franchise by a blood-curdling mile

It’s very rare for a fourquel to be the best film in a franchise, but that’s how things stand with the chequered 28 Days Later series. In this one, which follows immediately on from the previous episode, 28 Years Later, Ralph Fiennes and Jack O’Connell bring pure death-metal craziness. There is real energy and drama in this latest iteration of the post-apocalyptic zombie horror-thriller saga, created by director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland back in 2003, with Nia DaCosta taking over directing duties for this film. Fiennes’s dance to Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast is basically one of the most extraordinary moments of his career. At the screening I attended, we were on our feet, looking for a speaker bin to headbang into. The band surely has to rerelease this track with Fiennes’s performance as a new official video. His Voldemort was never so freaky.

It is just so exhilarating to see this intergenerational face-off between such superb actors as Fiennes and O’Connell. That brings us to the point of my agnosticism about this whole franchise; Bone Temple is the best for an interesting reason – because the zombies are almost entirely irrelevant and are at a minimum. The always slightly dull business of zombieism is de-emphasised, and what counts is the conflict between sentient human beings. Even the one important zombie here is interesting because he is being transformed into something else.

If you rush it because 31 January is on the horizon you are likely to make mistakes, or not have everything you need

The deadline is 31 January, but don’t put it off – try to set aside enough time over the next few days to complete your tax return for the tax year that ran from 6 April 2024 to 5 April 2025.

Policing inspectorate to say force made series of errors in how it gathered and handled intelligence

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West Midlands police will be criticised in a report about their handling of intelligence used to justify banning Israeli fans from a football game in Birmingham, the Guardian understands.

The inquiry was ordered by the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and carried out by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, the policing inspectorate.

Ministers have rolled back central element of digital ID plans, possibly allowing people to use other forms of identification to prove their right to work

Here are extracts from three interesting comment articles about the digital ID U-turn.

Ailbhe Rea in the New Statesman in the New Statesmans says there were high hopes for the policy when it was first announced.

I remember a leisurely lunch over the summer when a supporter of digital IDs told me how they thought Keir Starmer would reset his premiership. Alongside a reorganisation of his team in Number 10, and maybe a junior ministerial reshuffle, they predicted he would announce in his speech at party conference that his government would be embracing digital IDs. “It will allow him to show he’s willing to do whatever it takes to tackle illegal immigration,” was their rationale.

Sure enough, Starmer announced “phase two” of his government, reshuffled his top team and, on the Friday before Labour party conference, he duly announced his government would make digital IDs mandatory for workers. “We need to know who is in our country,” he said, arguing that the IDs would prevent migrants who “come here, slip into the shadow economy and remain here illegally”.

In policy terms, I don’t think you particularly gain anything by making the government’s planned new digital ID compulsory.

One example of that: Kemi Badenoch has both criticised the government’s plans to introduce compulsory ID, while at the same time committing to creating a “British ICE” that would go around deporting large numbers of people living in the UK. In a country with that kind of target and approach, people would be forced to carry their IDs around with them in any case! The Online Safety Act, passed into law by the last Conservative government with cross-party support and implemented by Labour, presupposes some form of ID to work properly.

Here is the political challenge for Downing Street: the climbdowns, dilutions, U- turns, about turns, call them what you will, are mounting up.

In just the last couple of weeks, there has been the issue of business rates on pubs in England and inheritance tax on farmers.

We welcome Starmer’s reported U-turn on making intrusive, expensive and unnecessary digital IDs mandatory. This is a huge success for Big Brother Watch and the millions of Brits who signed petitions to make this happen.

The case for the government now dropping digital IDs entirely is overwhelming. Taxpayers should not be footing a £1.8bn bill for a digital ID scheme that is frankly pointless.

While Grok has introduced belated safeguards to prevent sexualised AI imagery, other tools have far fewer limits

“Since discovering Grok AI, regular porn doesn’t do it for me anymore, it just sounds absurd now,” one enthusiast for the Elon Musk-owned AI chatbot wrote on Reddit. Another agreed: “If I want a really specific person, yes.”

If those who have been horrified by the distribution of sexualised imagery on Grok hoped that last week’s belated safeguards could put the genie back in the bottle, there are many such posts on Reddit and elsewhere that tell a different story.

US president says ‘help is on its way’, as reported death toll rises into the thousands

For the first time in days, Iranians were able to make calls abroad from their mobiles on Tuesday, according to reporting by Associated Press. Texting services have not been restored, however, and nor has the internet.

Although Iranians were able to call abroad, they could not receive calls from outside the country, several people in the capital told Associated Press. The internet remained blocked, they said, though it is possible to access some government-approved websites.

Cloudfare - an internet infrastructure provider, and one of several companies and monitors tracking the status of internet traffic in Iran – said traffic volumes have remained “at a fraction of a percent of previous levels”. Its latest update as of 01:00 UTC (which is about three hours and 30 minutes ago), shows a continued widespread blackout. Iran has been under an internet shutdown since Thursday night.

Brief windows of connectivity were observed on Friday, but these did not last, according to Cloudfare.

Netblocks, an independent global internet monitor, also notes that while some phone calls from Iran are connecting, there is “no secure way to communicate” and the general public remain cut off from the outside world.