Labour and the country have reached a historic inflection point. For all the talk of Brexit ‘benefits’, the anti-EU ideologues know the tide has turned

All the old gang were there: a reunion of the Brexit triumphalists. I was one of the guests in the stately drawing room of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Georgian townhouse in Westminster last week, as the Bruges Group met to cheer the launch of the new book 75 Brexit Benefits: Tangible Benefits from the UK Having Left the European Union. Tory Brexiteers Iain Duncan Smith, Bill Cash and John Redwood were all there, a gathering of the kind of Eurosceptics John Major once called the “bastards”.

Our host, Rees-Mogg, was in jubilant form, celebrating Keir Starmer’s recent speeches that named the economic damage done by Brexit. In Labour’s new willingness to touch the Brexit live rail, the Bruges Group members welcomed the revival of the grand old conflict as their way back to referendum glory days. Rees-Mogg chortled: “Starmer’s view that re-entering the European Union is the answer to our economy is as true as everything else he says.” Much mirth, as he departed early for his State of the Nation slot on GB News.

Their relatives might have been on opposite sides of near-nuclear war, but the US and Soviet leader’s descendants have teamed up for an intimate BBC podcast. They talk humanity, hate – and why Trump is a ‘very limited’ man

In October 1962, the world came closer to destruction than at any other point in modern times. After a US surveillance plane discovered that Soviet nuclear missile sites were being built in Cuba, less than 100 miles from the US mainland, President John F Kennedy responded by ordering the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet to impose a naval blockade around the island. Almost two weeks of impossible tension followed.

The threat was clear. If Kennedy, or his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, fired on their enemy, a chain reaction of global nuclear strikes and counterstrikes would have followed, plunging humanity into all-out ruination.

Residents say incursions and raids have increased since forces first entered country a year ago after fall of Assad

On the day Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell, Abu Ibrahim and his family went to sleep wondering what sort of future awaited them in the morning. They woke in a panic, to the sound of gunfire and tanks.

The bullets announced the arrival of the Israeli military into the remote southern Syrian province of Quneitra on 9 December 2024. In the place of Assad militias who used to patrol the roads, bulky armoured personnel carriers filled with Israeli soldiers rumbled down the potholed streets, stopping to assure residents that they were there for their protection.

When the new premier of the British Virgin Islands said he needed an armed security detail, his chief of police knew trouble was on its way

Augustus James Ulysses Jaspert, Gus for short, arrived in Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands, on 21 August 2017, just two weeks away from catastrophe. Jaspert, who was in his late 30s, had recently been appointed governor by Queen Elizabeth II, on the recommendation of the Foreign Office in London. The BVI is an overseas territory of Britain, with only partial independence, and the governor effectively acts as a backstop to the locally elected legislature. For Jaspert, a career civil servant, it would be his first hands-on experience of governing – and his first time in the British Virgin Islands. Any trepidation was outweighed by the prospect of moving to the Caribbean. “If you’re sitting in an office in London and someone says, ‘Go to Tortola,’ you look it up on a screen and think, ‘OK, I can do that,’” Jaspert told me.

While Jaspert, his wife and two sons were settling into their new life, a tropical storm gathered over the Atlantic. At first, forecasters weren’t unduly alarmed, but in the first days of September, the storm transformed into something much worse. In the afternoon of 6 September, Hurricane Irma made landfall in Tortola, which is home to the majority of the BVI’s 30,000-strong population. Irma was one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. It scalped buildings, blew out windows and removed entire floors from homes. Shipping containers smashed into the islanders’ fishing boats and the out-of-towners’ yachts.

From prog cabaret and joyful jangle-pop to a pop star who will drag you to the club, here are the year’s finest LPs as decided by 30 Guardian music writers
• More on the best culture of 2025

***

The reporter’s affair with Robert F Kennedy Jr raised a whole host of questions, few of which get answers in this pretentious memoir

Did he take me seriously?” Olivia Nuzzi wonders in the midst of her infamous affair with Robert F Kennedy Jr. Nuzzi, then Washington correspondent for New York magazine, has just learned that she and the Politician, as she calls RFK in her new book, may overlap during a visit to Mar-a-Lago. Nuzzi, worried Donald Trump will catch on to the relationship and start spreading rumours, convenes an emergency meeting with the Politician to strategise. RFK doesn’t see the big deal.

So, she agonises “Did he take me seriously?” and reflects that she had “little cause to consider the question before now.”

US president recycles far-right tropes on European immigration and presses Zelenskyy to accept his peace plan

• Europe live – latest updates

Donald Trump has hinted he could walk away from supporting Ukraine as he doubled down on his administration’s recent criticism of Europe, describing it as “weak” and “decaying” and claiming it was “destroying itself” through immigration.

In a rambling and sometimes incoherent interview with Politico, a transcript of which was released on Tuesday, the US president struggled to name any other Ukrainian cities except for Kyiv, misrepresented elements of the trajectory of the conflict, and recycled far-right tropes about European immigration that echoed the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.

Nine-year investigation paints highly critical picture of MI5’s handling of double agent

• Who was Stakeknife? MI5 mole at the heart of IRA

Britain’s security services allowed a top agent inside the IRA to commit murders and then impeded a police investigation into the affair, according to a damning official report.

MI5 helped the double agent known as Stakeknife to evade justice from a “perverse sense of loyalty” that outlasted Northern Ireland’s Troubles, the police investigation known as Operation Kenova said on Tuesday.

Accounts held by users under 16 must be removed on apps that include TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Kick, Twitch and Threads under ban

• How is Australia’s social media ban affecting you and your family?

• The social media ban explained: everything you need to know

Australia has enacted a world-first ban on social media for users aged under 16, causing millions of children and teenagers to lose access to their accounts.

Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Kick, Twitch and TikTok are expected to have taken steps from Wednesday to remove accounts held by users under 16 years of age in Australia, and prevent those teens from registering new accounts.

Lady Longfield named as chair of national inquiry after long-delayed search

• UK politics live – latest updates

The former children’s commissioner Anne Longfield will chair the national grooming gangs inquiry in what will be a “moment of reckoning” for the nation, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has announced.

Longfield, who will resign the Labour whip in the House of Lords, was recommended by Louise Casey after a long-delayed search during which some victims quit the inquiry’s advisory panel amid disagreements over the chair appointment.