Security for high-profile public figures to be reviewed after Ann Widdecombe’s murder

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Home secretary vows to defend against ‘threats from without and within that target our democracy’

Security arrangements for high-profile public figures including politicians and members of the royal family are to be urgently reviewed in the wake of the killing of Ann Widdecombe, Shabana Mahmood said on Monday.

The home secretary said former MPs, party leaders who are not MPs, peers, former members of devolved parliaments and party spokespeople will also be offered police support.

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Democrats rebuke federal raid of Ilhan Omar’s home: ‘rogue abuse of power’

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Top House Democrats question the ‘corrupt weaponization’ of federal government against Trump’s adversaries

Ilhan Omar’s Democratic colleagues have condemned federal agents’ search of the Minnesota congresswoman’s home on Monday morning, describing it as “deeply disturbing” and emblematic of the Trump administration’s “corrupt weaponization” of the US government.

House Democratic leaders, including minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, party whip Katherine Clark and caucus chair Pete Aguilar, issued a joint statement excoriating the president for the search.

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Man rescued from cave on Sardinia after being trapped by rockslide for 26 hours

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Luca Olmetto was trapped roughly 10 metres below ground in the Gorroppeddu cave in the Urzulei mountain range

A 31-year-old man has been pulled alive from a cave on the Italian island of Sardinia after being trapped roughly 10 metres below ground for 26 hours following a rockslide.

In a huge and complex operation, rescuers worked non-stop after Luca Olmetto became trapped in the Gorroppeddu cave in the rugged Urzulei mountain range in central-eastern Sardinia on Sunday afternoon.

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Burnham says ‘public will be the boss’ in any future decision about closer relationship with the EU – as it happened

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The prime minister tells MPs the next summit with the EU will be held on 20 November

Burnham to urge MPs to embrace closer ties with EU

Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson, is speaking now. He started his speech with an account of a 73-year-old woman dying in North Wales after having to wait 23 hours for an ambulance, and he sought to link this to immigration.

He said:

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimates that 15,000 people across Britain died last year due to excess wait times for emergency treatment. That’s 300 people a week, 300 lives destroyed, 300 families devastated.

And that number has increased tenfold over the last decade. This is a moral outrage, and it is a direct result of decisions made by Tory and Labour governments.

I don’t think that’s because he wants to have a fight over the European Union. I think that’s because he knows what we’re talking about today impacts hard in what is known as the red wall.

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Stellantis and Renault back UK to get EU car industry protection

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Bosses of Citroën owner and French carmaker also urge UK government to consider limiting imports from China

Stellantis and Renault have backed the UK car industry for inclusion in proposed rules to protect EU industry, but urged the British government to consider limiting imports of Chinese cars.

Emanuele Cappellano, who leads Stellantis’s European brands including Fiat, Citroën, Opel and Vauxhall, and François Provost, the chief executive of France’s Renault, said the UK should effectively be counted as one of the EU’s 27 member states for the purposes of the proposed “Made in Europe” legislation.

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Iran’s Revolutionary Guards ‘almost certainly’ behind RAF Fairford threats, says Burnham

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UK to bring further sanctions against Tehran and IRGC after assessment Iran was likely to have coordinated incident

Andy Burnham said Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were “almost certainly” behind threats to RAF Fairford, the firmest attribution of responsibility made so far by the UK after an incident late last month.

The prime minister told MPs the UK would bring further sanctions against Tehran and the IRGC in the aftermath of an ambiguous episode that, despite over a fortnight of police investigation, has yet to lead to anybody being charged.

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Hackers force French supermarket fridges to heat up to 50C in ‘unprecedented’ cyber-attack

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Hundreds of Intermarché shops and Coopérative U outlets in France hit, with fears Dutch chains also affected

Hackers have forced the temperature of many French supermarket fridges up to 50C overnight, in an “unprecedented” cyber-attack affecting several hundred stores across the country, with fires and food losses reported.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Monday ⁠the large-scale attack was “affecting connected refrigerators ⁠in several ​major food retailers across France”. Reported damage included “food losses and fires”, it added.

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How significant are Burnham’s remarks on Kremlin interference in Brexit vote?

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Prime minister has reopened the debate over whether Russia sought to influence the 2016 referendum

Andy Burnham unexpectedly reopened an old Brexit debate when he said he had been told after becoming prime minister that Russia had interfered in the 2016 EU referendum.

It was a contentious issue in the second half of the previous decade, but one that had largely been forgotten about as the UK finally adjusted to the reality of leaving the EU. Now Burnham’s comments have given the topic a fresh impetus.

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Saudi Arabia further suspends flights after latest deadly Houthi attack on airport

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Energy minister says ‘fear has no place in the Saudi lexicon’ as paramilitary group again breaches stretched defences

Saudi Arabia has been forced to suspend all flights to and from its main international airport in Riyadh until next Saturday after a further round of Houthi missile attacks caused more damage and left one person dead. Some airlines, including Gulf Air and Bahrain Air, had already said they were cancelling flights until next Saturday. More missiles were fired at Saudi Arabian cities by the Houthis on Monday, Saudi Arabian’s military spokesperson said.

The Gulf nation announced it was suspending flights from Riyadh, its second busiest airport, after Houthi missiles killed 13 people on Saturday and left more than 300 injured. Saudi state TV broadcast CCTV footage that showed passengers deluged in smoke and falling masonry as they queued at the airport terminal to board a plane just as the Houthi missile struck.

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Children and women included in Reform plan to immediately deport 90,000 asylum seekers

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Farage’s party says it would ‘embed’ immigration enforcement in UK and use ‘aerial imaging’ to identify people

Children and mothers would not be exempt from plans by Reform UK to immediately deport 90,000 asylum seekers and impose a five-year ban on people being granted asylum.

The party’s most hardline immigration policies to date were condemned by refugee charities and others as “unworkable” and an abandonment of Britain’s tradition of helping victims of war after they were announced by Nigel Farage on Monday.

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Nobel Prize for economics awarded to Hall and Woodford for work on ‘smoothing’ crises

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US economists developed models that help central bankers and finance ministers to stabilise their economies

Two US economists have won the 2026 Nobel economics prize for their work developing models that help central bankers and finance ministers to stabilise their countries, avoiding long recessions and runaway inflation.

Robert Hall of Stanford University, California, and Michael Woodford of Columbia University, New York, were recognised for developing the “microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation”, giving policymakers better tools to smooth out the peaks and troughs of their economies.

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More part-time bosses and co-CEOs could keep women in leadership and narrow Australia’s pay gap

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Uneven caring responsibilities combined with a lack of flexible work options have prevented women from staying in senior positions, research suggests

More part-time bosses and “co-CEOs” could keep women in leadership and narrow Australia’s gender pay gap, the federal government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency says.

WGEA warned resistance to gender equality was growing and urged employers to make management more flexible to reduce the gender pay gap, where women earn $0.79 for every $1 a man makes on average.

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Rescued turtles return home after NSW government cut flows to wetland

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Environmental water to the area was halted after a complaint from a private landholder, leading to the deaths of wildlife and sheep

Freshwater turtles rescued from a dried-up water hole in western New South Wales after the state government cut environmental water to the area are being returned home.

Late last month, 10 broad-shelled turtles and three Murray River turtles were released back into the Gingham water hole in the state’s Gwydir region.

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Julie Inman Grant may be able to limit Australians seeing a livestreamed US execution – but it could start a diplomatic incident

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A history of tech giant legal challenges and US political criticism shows there’s no easy solution for the eSafety commissioner

Australia’s online safety regulator has a few levers to limit the public seeing the US’s planned livestream of an execution, but history suggests it will lead to a very public fight.

The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, announced last week the planned execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan would be livestreamed when the military execution is carried out in early December.

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Australian democracy campaigner detained in Vietnam on alleged terrorism offences uncontactable, wife says

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Tran Hiep spent his 51st birthday alone in a notorious detention centre in Ho Chi Minh City after his sudden arrest last month

Tran Hiep spent his 51st birthday alone in a notorious detention centre in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City after his sudden arrest last month.

The Melbourne-based Vietnamese-Australian democracy campaigner hasn’t been heard from since mid-September when Vietnamese authorities detained him for alleged terrorism and forging identity documents.

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Rent-tech platforms sidestepping credit card surcharge ban with new fees and paid ‘memberships’

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Tenants encouraged to seek free options after online property platforms respond to Reserve Bank’s credit card payment reform

Online property management platforms are charging renters new fees or pushing them on to paid “memberships” to avoid processing costs associated with card payments in the wake of the ban on surcharges.

Tenants have been encouraged to challenge or bypass additional fees charged by so-called rent-tech platforms, including in Victoria, where fees on rent payments are banned.

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Fugitive businessman taken into US custody in Venezuela bribery case

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A businessman wanted in the US for allegedly bribing top Venezuelan officials has been taken into custody

A businessman wanted for years in the US for allegedly paying bribes to top Venezuelan officials in exchange for lucrative state contracts in Venezuela has been taken into custody.

Alvaro Pulido was indicted in Miami federal court in 2019 and again in 2021 as part of an investigation into his longtime business partner, Alex Saab, a one-time ally of ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the state department had been offering a reward of up to $10m for information leading to his arrest.

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NAZA: Netanyahu orders identification and prosecution of film’s interviewees

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Israeli PM calls for criminal investigation into soldiers and officers interviewed in Guardian-produced documentary

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has ordered the country’s attorney general and the head of the Shin Bet security service to reveal the identities of soldiers and officers interviewed in the investigative documentary NAZA and prosecute them for causing “harm to Israel’s diplomatic and security interests”.

The award-winning documentary, directed by the Oscar-winning film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by the Guardian, details Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza. The film is in cinemas, including in the UK and the US, and will be shown in more than 50 countries.

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