The Guardian World

Leading restaurateur says Gulf countries actively help businesses set up, while east Asia has a better work ethic

Some of London’s top restaurants are opening branches in Dubai because of a “tax tsunami” in the UK and better work ethic abroad, according to a leading restaurateur.

James Robson, a co-owner of Fallow in St James’s Market, regarded as the capital’s hottest restaurant, serving 1,000 people a day, has just signed a deal to open an outpost in the Gulf.

New details of IV team’s attempts to find a vein shared by Pike’s lawyer ‘shocked and disturbed’ practitioners

Medical experts have expressed shock at the apparent incompetence shown by Tennessee’s execution team during the failed lethal injection of Christa Pike, the prisoner who survived a normally fatal dose of pentobarbital, which they say would be considered medical malpractice in any other setting.

New details emerged on Thursday of how Tennessee’s intravenous (IV) team struggled for almost an hour to set up a line into Pike’s arms through which she would be administered the fatal dose of sedative. A blow-by-blow account was released in legal proceedings from Pike’s lawyer, Randy Spivey, who was present inside the death chamber at her 30 September failed execution.

Ebro Ahmed, who acted after driver’s medical emergency, said he hopes incident will show Eritreans ‘in a good way’

A man who hopped on to a school bus full of terrified children that was careering down a Minnesota street after its driver had a medical emergency and manually halted it says he was motivated to act by a Qu’ran verse about how saving one life is equivalent to saving all of humanity.

“I’m a numbers guy, and those numbers make sense to me,” Ebro Ahmed, 27, said on Friday during an interview about his actions four days earlier in front of his family’s convenience store in Saint Paul, Minnesota. “I didn’t do it for me. It was selflessness in the name of God.”

Mother, 36, died after current off North Bimini reportedly swept away two boys, who were later rescued, police say

A British woman has died in the Bahamas while trying to rescue her two sons after a current swept them away as they were snorkelling.

The Royal Bahamas police force said it had launched an investigation after the death of a 36-year-old woman on Tuesday.

Government campaign recommends three days’ worth of stores for emergencies, but some are ahead of the game

Dried foods, bottled water, medicine stocks and backup power banks: it could be the props cupboard on a disaster movie, but instead it is precisely what some UK residents are stockpiling amid official warnings about Russian “state-sponsored terrorism” and the impact of the climate crisis.

The government launched a campaign on Thursday advising people to set aside three days’ worth of stores to deal with a whole range of eventualities, and some are already well under way.

Founding member of Planxty, Lunny went on to play for bands such as Moving Hearts, the Bothy Band and Coolfin

The Irish traditional musician Dónal Lunny has died at the age of 79 from cancer.

Lunny rose to prominence in the trio Rakes of Kildare alongside his brother Frank and Christy Moore. He went on to play in bands such as Planxty, Moving Hearts, the Bothy Band and Coolfin among others and toured the world.

BBC series deliberately uses ‘more organic’ shots to assure viewers animals are not AI-generated, producers say

The David Attenborough-narrated series Blue Planet III deliberately includes cloudier, less polished footage to counter AI fakery and assure viewers it is “authentic”, its producers have said.

Nearly a decade after Blue Planet II shone a light on plastic pollution, and 25 years since the first Blue Planet aired, the hit BBC series is returning with more animal behaviour and cutting-edge technology, including the world’s first underwater CCTV camera – dubbed “stonefish” cam.

Tim and Geli Harris have spent more than a decade fighting to protect Catfield Fen, a rare wetland in the Norfolk Broads

Polluters and regulators who fail to stop pollution must quake in their boots when they receive a letter from the lawyers for Tim and Geli Harris. The couple, who farm 460 acres in the Norfolk Broads, have now scored a hat-trick of landmark legal victories to save an internationally important wetland after they won again in the high court this month.

Lady Justice Lieven found that Natural England failed in its statutory duty to protect Catfield Fen from pollution after nitrates and phosphates washed from arable fields into one of the finest examples of calcareous fen in western Europe, home to 2,500 species including rarities such as the fen orchid, crested buckler fern, breeding bittern and swallowtail butterflies.

Video shows AI likenesses of people linked to Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist party appearing to admit to wrongdoing

A political ad from Spain’s main opposition party that used a deepfake video of the prime minister’s wife has sparked outrage and set off a wider debate on AI, as the deeply polarised country gears up for general elections next month.

Launched this week across the social media channels of the conservative People’s party (PP), the video used artificial intelligence to manipulate the likenesses of various people linked to Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist party and appeared to show them admitting to acts such as soliciting prostitutes and taking kickbacks.

Are we doomscrolling our way into a democratic crisis? That’s what the playwright James Graham fears may be happening, as he suggests that our algorithms have led us into ‘a massive crisis of the new’ and are preventing us from imagining a different future

Watch the full episode with James Graham here.

INK will be released in UK cinemas on 8 January 2027

Aditya suggested reading (and watching) list for James Graham:

Dear England: about England’s football team

Sherwood: mentioned in the conversation, set in the village where James Graham grew up in the shadow of the miners’ strike

Quiz: set on the British quiz show, Who wants to be a millionaire, where a contestant wins a million quid

Data released under freedom of information laws reveals hundreds of projects unfinished despite Tory promises on regional equality

• Can a £5.8bn scheme help revive Grimsby and other town centres?

Most levelling up projects are not finished, years after funds were allocated, highlighting how ambitious Conservative promises of quick progress on regional equality have faltered.

Data released under freedom of information laws and manually reviewed by the Guardian found 821 levelling up projects out of 1,347 were yet to be finalised as of May this year. Across the UK, 73 council areas that had a bid for a project accepted were yet to see a single one fully completed. The Guardian has identified 59 projects that were completed since the data was collected.

Closures within chain formerly under the WH Smith brand raise fears of high streets becoming ‘postal deserts’

Towns and even city centres face being left as “postal deserts” after it emerged that more than a third of post offices within the troubled TG Jones chain are closing.

So far this year 36 branches within the high street chain formerly known as WH Smith have closed and a further 34 are set to close by early 2027, according to Post Office records analysed by the Guardian.

Established under the Franco dictatorship, the lunchtime ritual is in decline but all is not lost

A little before lunchtime each working day across Spain, evidence of one of the lingering, if less notorious, legacies of the Franco dictatorship is carefully traced in chalk, marker pen and printer ink.

Beckoning to hungry workers from blackboards, whiteboards and pieces of paper hastily taped to windows, the competitively priced menú del día, or daily set-price lunch, has been part of everyday Spanish life for more than half a century. But while 4m menús are still served each weekday, Spain is slowly losing its appetite for the familiar ritual.

Security forces to include elite units usually used for counter-terrorism after worst street violence in years

France will deploy about 70,000 police around the country on Saturday as the government seeks to prevent more civil unrest after some of the worst street violence in years erupted on the fringes of cost-of-living protests last weekend.

The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, said on ⁠Friday ⁠the security forces would include elite units usually used for counter-terrorism operations and hostage rescues, adding that there had been social media calls for violence from “ultra-left” groups.

Chancellor says government to commit hundreds of millions to develop ‘distinctively British’ approach to AI

John Healey has pledged to use Wednesday’s budget to harness the power of artificial intelligence to bolster Britain’s security and prosperity against the risks in the accelerating global technology arms race.

As he prepares for his debut budget, the chancellor said that Andy Burnham’s government would commit hundreds of millions of pounds to develop a “distinctively British” approach to AI that would capitalise on the benefits of the frontier technology.

The prime minister has defined and dominated his country’s politics for three decades and is putting his rivals on the defensive before Tuesday’s general election

They chant his name, they cheer and clap – and yet he is not the most dominant person in the room. Looming over the crowd that has gathered to hear Gadi Eisenkot, the former general who is the lead opposition challenger in Tuesday’s Israeli election, is a man who is not there. It is the man Eisenkot seeks to replace as prime minister, the man who first served in that role three decades ago and who has held it, on and off, for 19 of the past 30 years. It is Benjamin Netanyahu.

Naturally, the warm-up speakers at this evening rally in the modest city of Modi’in, halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, stress the virtues of Eisenkot, a son of working-class Moroccan Jews who rose through the ranks to become chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces and entered politics only four years ago. But every sentence might as well end with two words that go unspoken: unlike Bibi.

Humble breakfast staple at heart of trend stirred up by health concerns and hearty spoonfuls of nostalgia

The clocks may be going back in the UK this weekend, but the biggest sign winter is coming is a steaming bowl of porridge on a breakfast table.

A staple for centuries, porridge is traditionally made with oats, water and a pinch of salt or sugar. However, the humble dish is now experiencing its own renaissance, with the latest iterations transforming it from drab to decadent. The trend is being driven by a growing fibre-centric movement as well as by nostalgia.

The Senate candidate denounced opponent Ken Paxton, calling out corruption allegations and support from Musk

James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in Texas, has taken aim at Elon Musk, warning that the tech mogul is trying to buy political influence and declaring: “Texas is not for sale.”

Talarico held a campaign rally on Friday at the University of Texas at Austin, packing an auditorium at his alma mater with hundreds of students and other supporters, who cheered, whooped and waved campaign signs.

Super typhoon weakening but large parts of Taiwan, including Taipei, still mostly closed and flights cancelled

Typhoon Champi swept past Taiwan on Saturday killing one person, injuring more than 500, and uprooting trees and severing power as it weakened and ⁠headed north toward ⁠the ​Chinese coast.

Earlier classified as a super typhoon and one of the strongest storms in the ⁠Pacific this year, Champi was still packing gusts of about 126km per hour (78 miles per hour) near its ⁠centre, according to Taiwan’s Central Weather Administration (CWA).

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With less than two weeks until the midterms, my colleague Jonathan Freedland and Guardian US columnist Moira Donegan are answering your questions in this week’s episode of Politics Weekly America.

They break down the final stretch ahead of these hugely consequential elections, that will decide control of Congress in Donald Trump’s final two years of office.