He stole our hearts in The Celebrity Traitors – then it all went wrong. The actor and comedian opens up

When I catch up with Nick Mohammed, he is on the set of War, a new HBO series. Full of legal eagles, tech-bro hot shots and ugly divorces, it’s a punchy, slick enterprise, nothing at all like The Celebrity Traitors – except for the high drama, unbearable tension and the fact that Mohammed is reunited with Celia Imrie. Traitors was filmed in April and May and this started in September, so they both knew exactly what had happened in the castle, but were still in their chamber of deadly secrecy. Mainly, Mohammed was happy just to kick about with Imrie again. “She’s wonderful,” he says. “Everything you think she might be, she absolutely is – she’s just brilliant.”

Which brings us to the root of the problem, the answer to the question: “What the hell happened, Nick?” Spoiler alert: we intend to talk about exactly what went down in the most infuriating Traitors final since, well, the last non-celebrity Traitors. If Joe Marler had had his way, he and Nick would have sauntered to victory, Alan Carr’s magisterial fibbing finally unmasked. Instead, Nick’s niggling doubts brought down the ship.

In Portishead, a dusty box of forgotten files led Jo Smith and her team to a criminal who had escaped justice for more than half a century. This was the longest-running cold case to be solved in the UK, and possibly the world

In June 2023, Jo Smith, a major crime review officer for Avon and Somerset police, was asked by her sergeant to “take a look at the Louisa Dunne case”. Louisa Dunne was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a hub of political activity. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a well-known figure in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the police investigation unearthed little to go on apart from a palm print on a rear window. Police knocked on 8,000 doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed unsolved.

It was 2020, and I hired a gazebo and heaters so we could have a festive feast with my mum in the garden. What could possibly go wrong?

We called it “diffmas”, because it was going to be a different kind of Christmas. Our son was five, so we were trying to package it appealingly for him. But we might have done that anyway, given the kind of year we’d had – and by “we” I don’t just mean my family, I mean the world.

It was 2020. When the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, had announced, in March, that we “must stay at home”, it left my mum, who had lived on her own since my dad died in 2012, completely alone, like many people, for months on end. Her work had involved travelling all over the country, having meetings, organising events, networking. Then, in lockdown, everything stopped. She was Zooming with the best of them, but it was clearly extremely difficult.

Seaweed has become a key cash crop as climate change and industrial trawling test the resilient culture of the semi-nomadic Vezo people

Along Madagascar’s south-west coast, the Vezo people, who have fished the Mozambique Channel for countless generations, are defined by a way of life sustained by the sea. Yet climate change and industrial exploitation are pushing this ocean-based culture to its limits.

Coastal villages around Toliara, a city in southern Madagascar, host tens of thousands of the semi-nomadic Vezo people, who make a living from small-scale fishing on the ocean. For centuries, they have launched pirogues, small boats carved from single tree trunks, every day into the turquoise shallows to catch tuna, barracuda and grouper.

A boat near lines of seaweed, which has become a main source of income for Ambatomilo village as warmer seas, bleached reefs and erratic weather accelerate the decline of local fish populations

Life goes on in a vibrant Greater Manchester neighbourhood after a plan for an attack was thwarted

“They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat,” Andrew Walters said.

It is an old Jewish joke that’s as relevant as ever in Greater Manchester in the face of today’s threats.

The Guardian’s editor-in-chief Katharine Viner looks back on the biggest news stories of 2025

It has been a year dominated by Donald Trump. It has not yet even been 12 full months since his return to the White House in January but already the changes he has wrought – in the US and around the world – would have seemed scarcely conceivable in 2024.

Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, tells Annie Kelly what it has looked like from the editor’s chair: from the deployment of the National Guard on American streets, to the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, to the erosion of the rules that once governed peace and war.

Documents give further insight into former royal’s ties to sex offender and raise fresh questions for Donald Trump

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor asked Jeffrey Epstein’s fixer Ghislaine Maxwell to arrange meetings with “inappropriate friends” while she sought “friendly and discreet and fun” girls on his behalf, the latest documents from the Epstein files appear to show.

The largest release yet of files concerning the financier and convicted child sex offender – which also raise fresh questions for the US president, Donald Trump – include emails in the name of “A” exchanging detailed messages with Maxwell that appeared to identify the author as Andrew.

Emails recording that Britain’s Metropolitan police contacted the FBI last month to inquire whether there were any ongoing investigations related to the disgraced former prince’s association with Epstein.

Emails showing US lawyers claiming “various factual inaccuracies” in a statement provided on Andrew’s behalf during their investigation of Epstein.

Multiple references to Donald Trump, including a claim by a senior US attorney that Trump was on a flight in the 1990s with Epstein and a 20-year-old woman. There is no indication of whether the woman was a victim of any crime, and Trump has consistently denied wrongdoing.

Files featuring redactions that were found to be removable through Photoshop techniques or simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.

‘Explosive device’ was triggered when police approached a suspicious person, say officials

Two traffic police officers and a third person have been killed in a car explosion in Moscow, Russia’s investigative committee has said

The committee, which investigates major crimes, said in a statement on Wednesday “an explosive device was triggered” when the officers approached a “suspicious person” near their police vehicle on Yeletskaya Street in the south of the capital.

Qesser Zuhrah and Amu Gib, on remand at HMP Bronzefield in Surrey, had refused food for almost 50 days in protest at the ban on Palestine Action

Two Palestine Action-affiliated prisoners have paused their hunger strikes due to deteriorating health but have vowed to resume the protest next year.

Qesser Zuhrah and Amu Gib have temporarily resumed eating, according to a statement released by Prisoners for Palestine group on Tuesday evening.

Video shows Gen Xu Qinxian explaining why he refused to deploy troops to crush 1989 student-led demonstrations

Rare footage of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) general who defied orders to lead his troops into Tiananmen Square and crush the 1989 student protesters has been leaked online, offering a highly unusual glimpse into the upper echelons of the military at one of the most fraught moments in modern Chinese history.

General Xu Qinxian’s refusal to take his troops from the PLA’s prestigious 38th Group Army, a unit based on the outskirts of Beijing, into the capital has been the stuff of Tiananmen lore for decades.