In the UK, all eyes were on chancellor Rachel Reeves as she delivered a budget that raised taxes and increased public spending. Though it kept the bond markets happy, and Labour MPs onside for now, it’s a risky strategy. In keeping with the buildup, chaos continued right to the final minutes before the chancellor’s speech, with the independent Office for Budget Responsibility mistakenly leaking the details of the entire budget before Reeves had stood up. We covered the drama of the day in depth, including from the trading floor of a London bank, which declared the budget “a bit of a relief”.
After the terrible fire that engulfed a set of Hong Kong high-rises and has killed at least 128 people, our team produced this powerful visual guide.
As the Trump administration once again wavered on Ukraine, questions over the nation’s future loomed large. Luke Harding produced a powerful dispatch on how Ukrainians are struggling with relentless power outages, while Pjotr Sauer wrote a compelling profile on Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin’s man leading talks from the Russian side. Gaby Schütze documented women on the frontline in this striking photo essay.
In one of the most distressing stories of the week, Angelique Chrisafis spoke to three women among dozens in France alleging that they were drugged with diuretics by a senior civil servant during job interviews.
Environment editor Fiona Harvey covered the final twists and turns of the Cop30 deal as it was dragged across the line in Belém, Brazil. In the last instalment in our This is Climate Breakdown series, Ajit Niranjan interviewed Toñi García whose husband and daughter died in the floods in Valencia in 2024. We also published some hopeful pieces on the environment: Steve Rose met the Youngwilders, a group of environmentalists who rewilded a farm and started a movement; Andrei Popoviciu wrote from Bucharest about how Romanian authorities have transformed their recycling system with the largest deposit return scheme in the world.
The final week of the Australian parliament for 2025 was an unedifying spectacle, with far-right senator Pauline Hanson walking into parliament in a burqa, a stunt that she first performed in 2017, and which exposed her as a “fringe dweller, with narrow political interests and bad instincts,” according to political editor Tom McIlroy. The entire incident highlighted a parliamentary culture that Muslim senator Mehreen Faruqi characterised as one that “drips now in racism”. At least the week ended with a long-awaited deal on new environment protection laws, which include some key improvements on current legislation.
At a time when much of the national conversation in the US remains fixed on Washington, we launched Building Power, a landmark reporting series on civic action that aims to draw attention to the people and communities organising to protect democracy, civil rights and public health in the United States. A companion data project will track and visualise the deletion or alteration of public information and the impact this has on civil rights and community health. Setting the scene, Rachel Leingang gave us a tour of the growing landscape and why it looks so different to Donald Trump’s first term. Victoria Namkung looked at how American citizens are turning to protest for the first time.
Last week I wrote about the impact Virginia Giuffre’s memoir had on me while reading it. The writer V (formerly Eve Ensler) wrote powerfully about the anxiety that reading the book gave her, as a fellow survivor of sexual violence, and the parallels Giuffre’s story had with the abuse V suffered as a child.
After a lengthy buildup, the first men’s Ashes Test was all over in … two days. Ali Martin and Simon Burnton reported on England’s quickest defeat to Australia in more than 100 years, Geoff Lemon saluted the hosts’ victory and there was plenty for Max Rushden and the team to discuss on our Ashes Weekly podcast.
I enjoyed Claire Armitstead on the friendship between the late artist Paula Rego and playwright Martin McDonagh; Heather Main on Britain’s everyday heroes, from bus driver of the year to Scotland’s greatest loo attendant; Leah Harper on the decline of the living room; and Emine Saner’s revealing interview with Karen Carney. I was very affected to read Carney say that she has never recovered from the online abuse she has suffered as a female football commentator. And rock and pop critic Alexis Petridis set himself a challenge: could he learn to love free jazz with the help of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore? (Yes he could!)
Our Filter teams in the UK and US are working hard to provide suggestions for affordable, keepable and sustainable Christmas gifts people will be delighted to receive. There was also a set of great tips from our Saturday magazine columnists if you want to treat someone to the same chef’s knife that Yotam Ottolenghi uses …
I was cheered to read Emma Freud’s tribute to her mother, the actor Jill Freud, who has died aged 98, in our Other Lives obituaries column. Especially the secret to her vitality: “having the same lunch every day: a glass of red wine, a packet of crisps and the Guardian”.
One more thing … Antonia Hitchens’s New Yorker interview with Laura Loomer paints a sinister picture of an extremist close to Trump whose entire life is spent online, violently denouncing people she disagrees with and having great influence over the White House and beyond. The comparison with Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, is apposite – a “histrionic, conspiratorial and aggressive woman [who] was the keeper of a list of those to be purged”, writes Hitchens, quoting a former US national security council official.