Thirty Palestinian children and three women released from Israeli prisons; more Israeli hostages to be released as part of ceasefire extension

Another batch of 10 Israeli hostages are expected to be released by Hamas today, in line with the extension of the ceasefire. The Guardian has been keeping track of those released so far here:

A London surgeon has described witnessing a “massacre unfold” during 43 days spent under bombardment in Gaza, saying the destruction of the Palestinian health system was a military objective of the war.

Recently launched Malligyong-1 also sent ‘detailed’ pictures of US nuclear aircraft carriers, says regime, although claims are not verified

North Korea has claimed its recently launched satellite has sent back “detailed” images of the White House, the Pentagon and US nuclear aircraft carriers that have been viewed by the regime leader, Kim Jong-un.

The existence of the images has not been independently verified, and experts say it is too soon to determine if the Malligyong-1 spy satellite is functioning properly, a week after its launch.

Climate scientists say fossil fuel use needs to fall rapidly – but oil-rich kingdom is working to drive up demand

Saudi Arabia is driving a huge global investment plan to create demand for its oil and gas in developing countries, an undercover investigation has revealed. Critics said the plan was designed to get countries “hooked on its harmful products”.

Little was known about the oil demand sustainability programme (ODSP) but the investigation obtained detailed information on plans to drive up the use of fossil fuel-powered cars, buses and planes in Africa and elsewhere, as rich countries increasingly switch to clean energy.

Winds, snow and flooding hit Ukraine, Russia and Moldova; Nato convenes council of foreign ministers on Ukraine, with Blinken attending

Russia might impose a ban on grain exports if its stocks fall to 10m tonnes, the Izvestia daily newspaper report this morning, citing a government document.

Reuters said Russia’s agriculture ministry did not respond to its request to comment on the article.

Far-right leader says his Party for Freedom is ‘broad’ people’s party as he tries to form coalition

Speaking at an international conference this morning on a global alliance to counter migrant smuggling, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said “the first track we will work on is to prevent and dissuade people from entrusting their life to smugglers”.

The Commission chief said:

We must be tough and united in our response to the crime of smuggling. We must all put in place the right legislation. We must get our law enforcement agencies and prosecution services to work together. We must seize the assets used by criminals. We must shut down the international supply chains and financial flows of criminal groups. And we can only do this together.

We must offer more legal alternatives to the people who want to seek fortune abroad. This is an interest we all share.

Cancer Research says Britain is lagging behind other comparable countries in terms of survival rates

Thousands of people are dying needlessly from cancer because the UK lags behind comparable countries when it comes to survival rates, a damning report says.

Big strides forward have been made in treating the disease over the past 50 years, according to the study by Cancer Research UK, but slow and late diagnosis coupled with treatment delays mean the progress is “at risk of stalling”.

Company last month hoped for a valuation of $80-$90bn, according to reports, making it the largest initial public offering (IPO) in years

Fast fashion giant Shein has reportedly lodged confidential paperwork with US securities regulators, informing them of an intention to go public in the US.

The listing would likely be the largest initial public offering (IPO) in years.

Russian businessman claims book defamed him, while authors say aim is to destroy their reputation

A Russian businessman has successfully taken legal action to ban a book in Germany about the Kremlin and its spy agencies, in a case that freedom of speech groups have described as an alarming attack on public interest reporting.

Two London-based Russian journalists, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, say they interviewed the businessman, Alexey Kozlov, for their 2019 book The Compatriots because of his family’s historical connections to Soviet intelligence. He has now won a court injunction against the book’s publisher.

One diplomat likens ex-PM’s trip to EU headquarters for Nato talks to a ‘divorcee returning to the family home’

David Cameron will return to Brussels on Tuesday in an official capacity for the first time since his doomed campaign for Britain to remain in the European Union.

The former prime minister, who made a surprise return to frontline politics this month when he became the UK foreign secretary, will attend a Nato meeting of foreign ministers to discuss issues including ammunition supply to Ukraine and the alliance’s continued presence in Kosovo.

Tory source says ‘it became impossible for meeting to go ahead’ after Kyriakos Mitsotakis urged return of antiquities to Athens

Greece’s prime minister has criticised the decision of his British counterpart Rishi Sunak to cancel planned talks at which he had hoped to raise the issue of the Parthenon marbles, as disagreements over the antiquities erupted with renewed vigour.

As aides described Sunak’s move as “wrong and undignified”, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who is visiting London, voiced irritation at the scheduled Downing Street meeting being called off at the 11th hour.

Natural History Museum prepares to study pristine material gathered in Nasa’s Osiris-Rex mission

A teaspoon’s worth of dark dust and granules scooped from an asteroid 200m miles from Earth has arrived at the Natural History Museum in London, where scientists are preparing to unlock its secrets.

Researchers at the museum received 100mg of the pristine material, which at 4.6bn years old dates back to the dawn of the solar system, after Nasa’s Osiris-Rex mission stopped at asteroid Bennu in 2020 and returned samples to Earth in September.

Who has been released so far?

Munder family: Keren, 54, her son Ohad, 9, and her mother, Ruth, 78

Pair speak about Gaza conflict but not online antisemitism nor controversial post made by X owner this month

Elon Musk has joined the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in visiting a kibbutz that was attacked by Hamas on 7 October, after criticism of his endorsement of an antisemitic post on X.

The owner of X, the site formerly known as Twitter, has been criticised for supporting a post on his platform that falsely claimed Jewish people were stoking hatred against white people. High-profile advertisers have also suspended spending on the site after a report that ads were appearing next to pro-Nazi content.

Nofuz Hammad, 16, was on the list of those to be freed, but when her father went to meet her, she did not emerge

Palestinian families, as well as Israelis, have been celebrating reunions, as loved ones held in Israeli prisons return home under the ceasefire deal with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. But for the Hammad family, from occupied East Jerusalem, this week has brought more questions than answers – and more worry than joy.

Their daughter, 16-year-old Nofuz Hammad, was on the list of imprisoned women and children to be released on Saturday, the second day of an agreed four-day truce. Only one member of each family was allowed to go to collect the detainees, some of whom, including Nofuz, were supposed to be released at the notorious West Jerusalem detention and interrogation facility known as the Russian Compound.

Ziad, a 35-year-old Palestinian, helps bring water to displaced families and gets a poignant reminder of Gaza before the war

9am Ahmad, the middle son of the host family we are staying with, is one of the most helpful people I know. He collected some money from friends and got a big tank of drinking water to take to where displaced families are located. He chooses an area that has two schools full of evacuees. According to Ahmad, water is delivered to the schools, but some of them have more than 10,000 people inside. So no amount of water is enough.

We will keep putting the environment front and centre to ensure the most important voices of our time are heard

“Final warning.” “Now or never.” “Crazy off-the-charts records.” “Absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.” “We are damned fools.”

As the Guardian’s head of environment, I read the words of climate scientists every day. They tell our reporters the facts, explain the science, and warn of what is to come. But when governments and corporations still don’t act with the urgency and ambition required, it feels like words are in danger of losing their power.

We have been measuring our organisation’s biodiversity footprint – here’s how we did it

Nature provides us with air to breathe, food to eat and water to drink. The metal in your laptop, the wood in your desk, the glass made from sand – they all come from nature. We depend upon these resources and yet, as we extract them, we are destroying places where wildlife lives.

There are an estimated 1 million species at risk of extinction. As a result, the delicate balance between species that sustains life on Earth is at risk of collapse, with damaged ecosystems making the climate crisis worse, undermining our food supply and putting livelihoods at risk. Half of global GDP is moderately or highly dependent on nature, according to the World Economic Forum.

Six things the Guardian is doing to confront the emergency facing our climate and the natural world

Four years ago, we took a stand. Of all the crises facing the world, the most alarming is climate breakdown. We asked ourselves: what can the Guardian do? The answer: to report relentlessly on this emergency each day – its causes, consequences and solutions. To keep pressure on governments and businesses to act now, to make changes for the better, to make good on their promises. And to look at our own organisation to ensure we are practising what we preach.

Now, we are updating our readers and supporters on the progress we have made on six vital promises – including, this year, a stronger commitment to the natural world.

Every day, we learn more about the royals’ colonial legacy and financial privileges – and it has given a huge boost to the republican movement

It was a wintry and ominous November Tuesday. A crowd of 50 or 60 republicans waited outside Westminster for the state opening of parliament. “Not my king”, read their big, yellow banners. Even if you didn’t care about the existence of the monarchy one way or another, there was something ineffably sad about the whole fandango. King Charles, pushing 75, was about to perform this duty as king for the first time. He was charged with reading out unhinged oil and gas policies that directly threatened the only thing he has ever publicly cared about – the environment. Figurehead of the country, or the puppet of a hooligan regime?

Maybe, at the moment, those two things are the same. Only one of the protesters, a woman in her early 60s who declined to give her name, had zero sympathy: “He should have the guts to speak his mind,” she said, in a meld of anatomical metaphors.

At the US-Mexico border site, called open-air detention centers by some, migrants face harsh weather in makeshift tents

It’s 8am on a chilly fall morning when the U-Haul pulls up at the US-Mexico border wall in Jacumba Hot Springs, California.

Dozens of people emerge from makeshift tents and from around small bonfires to welcome it, and line up for some of the water bottles and peanut butter jelly sandwiches its volunteers are carrying.

Latin America is the fastest-growing producer of the lucrative crop, but at what price for the environment and its defenders?

Park ranger Adonias Cruz was out monitoring illegal oil palm crops in Blanca Jeannette Kawas national park, on the north coast of Honduras, on 10 September, when an unknown armed man came to his flat and rang the bell. When the stranger realised Cruz was out, he left him a death threat.

“I had already received death threats from people in the community for leading a team to eradicate a new oil palm plantation in the central zone of the park,” says Cruz. “It was frightening to know they were in my flat and that everything could have ended differently if I had been home that day.”

Alarmed by the rising tide of waste we are all creating, my family and I decided to try to make do with much less. But while individual behaviour is important, real change will require action on a far bigger scale

One freezing cold morning, I drove past the outer edge of Denver, Colorado, past Buckley air force base, past the suburban neighbourhoods huddled at the edge of the Great Plains. I saw rising from the prairie several low bumps, lifting from the horizon like icebergs. As I got close to them, I saw they were encircled by barbed wire and knew I had reached my destination.

I pulled into the Denver Arapahoe Disposal Site, cutely known as Dads. I was part of a tour, arranged by a local reporter. Ten people gathered around our guide, Doc Nyiro, a Dads manager, middle-aged, with a studious, geeky demeanour. Nyiro began by telling us that Dads is open 24 hours a day, six days a week. Every day, 800 trucks arrive, culminating in about 2m tonnes of refuse a year. We watched the trucks pulling into the weigh station. “It just doesn’t slow down,” Nyiro said. “Truck after truck.”

The plot of this trouble-in-suburbia thriller might be flimsy – but who cares when there’s so much sexual tension between our flirtatious foursome?

There are two extraordinary features to note about Channel 4’s new six-part drama series The Couple Next Door, which examines the combustible effects of a hot, swinging couple on a pair of conservative young things who move in next door. The first is that it succeeds in being sexy rather than cringemaking. This is vanishingly rare and comes courtesy of a clever, layered script that ties each of the narrative strands together perfectly and takes enough time to build every relationship within the foursome to allow what unfolds to feel plausible. Writer David Allison understands that even people destined to climb into bed with each other are capable of thinking and talking about other things while lust brews in the background, and cracking a few jokes along the way. I don’t know if this was present in the Dutch series New Neighbours, on which this is based, and Allison had the sense to keep it intact or if it’s all his own work but it is fantastically well done. There should be a special annual award for any creation that manages to deliver convincing spousal banter like Allison does here.

The second extraordinary point is the casting of Hugh Dennis as a stalker. Alan (Dennis) is obsessed with Becka, the more free-spirited of the hot swingers (played by Jessica de Gouw, coupling her innate credibility as a hot swinger with a nuanced portrait of a woman making the best of a life she never expected and which will soon take a turn for the worse). And it turns out that Dennis, after decades of providing gentle humour in roles playing on his unthreatening affability in the likes of Outnumbered and Not Going Out, is the perfect creep. Alan starts off as what you might call a bit of a saddo, but as his circumstances change and appetites grow, we watch with bated breath as his behaviour escalates and his mood darkens. It would be a brilliant performance even if its purveyor were not so unexpected, but the casting adds an extra touch of uncanniness to the whole.

How does a species survive hundreds of millions of years unfazed? You must live in a shell – and it must grow with you, chamber by chamber

Where to start with the nautilus: at the centre of the spiral or its culmination? Its eye works slowly, like a pinhole camera. It swims like a bellows. It can live for two decades, and its eggs take a year to hatch. It is a cephalopod in a shell, a spiral no wider than the length of a ruler, ending in 70 tentacle-like wavy bits. The tentacle-like bits are called cirri and they are very good at touch and smell.

One scientist describes it like this: “Right now everything’s in bloom, and, you know, you can smell the azaleas. But can you imagine if you could also say, ‘That azalea bush has 3,002 blossoms on it.’” (Their favourite things to touch and smell are not flowers but anything rotting.)

The writer was on the operating table for cancer, then exactly a year later he found out his nightmarish vision had made the shortlist. He reveals why the words for Prophet Song came out with such urgency, there was no time for paragraph breaks

‘The universal trickster has been at work on my life in all sorts of wild ways,” Irish novelist Paul Lynch tells me the morning after he was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel Prophet Song, which imagines Ireland taken over by a fascist regime. It has been a dramatic few years since he started writing the novel in 2018: his son had just been born; he had long Covid, which made writing an impossibility some days; he has had cancer and separated from his wife. And now he has landed the biggest prize in contemporary fiction. “There’s a general sense of unreality,” he says of winning. “I’ve stepped into my own ‘Sliding Doors’ counterfactual narrative.”

Before beginning the novel, Lynch had spent months writing “the wrong book”. Then, one Friday afternoon, he realised it was dead. The following Monday he sat in his shed at the bottom of his garden in Dublin, opened a new Word document and the first page of Prophet Song came to him almost as it appears in the novel. He describes it as “one of the miracles” of his writing life. “The entire meaning of what was to come in the book is encoded in those first few lines and yet I didn’t know what I was going to write.”