For this year’s Guardian charity appeal we are asking readers to donate to Citizens UK, The Linking Network, Locality, Hope Unlimited Charitable Trust and Who is Your Neighbour?

• Donate to our charity appeal here

It has been an unsettling year of social division, anger and unrest in the UK and beyond. Extremist violence and rhetoric are escalating, with the demonisation of migrants reaching a fever pitch. Far-right activists march in the streets. NHS nurses, care workers and charities face abuse amid a resurgence of “1970s-style racism”.

Against this toxic backdrop, the Guardian is launching its 2025 charity appeal on Friday. This year’s theme, unapologetically, is hope. We are supporting grassroots charities, which, through their vital work at the heart of local neighbourhoods, nurture community pride and positive change, and provide a powerful antidote to polarisation, distrust and hate.

Designer Michael Schmidt’s 36-piece collection was made from the wool of rams who have shown same-sex attraction

When a ram tips its head back, curls its upper lip, and takes a deep breath – what is known in the world of animal husbandry as a “flehmen response” – it is often a sign of arousal. Sheep have a small sensory organ located above the roof of the mouth, and the flehmen response helps to flood it with any sex pheromones wafting about.

Usually, rams flehmen when they encounter ewes during the mating period, according to Michael Stücke, a farmer with 30 years of experience raising sheep in Westphalia, Germany. But on Stücke’s farm, the rams flehmen “all the time”.

Many users of the app were shocked, this week, by this addition to the Spotify Wrapped roundup – especially twentysomethings who were judged to be 100

“Age is just a number. So don’t take this personally.” Those words were the first inkling I had that I was about to receive some very bad news.

I woke up on Wednesday with a mild hangover after celebrating my 44th birthday. Unfortunately for me, this was the day Spotify released “Spotify Wrapped”, its analysis of (in my case) the 4,863 minutes I had spent listening to music on its platform over the past year. And this year, for the first time, they are calculating the “listening age” of all their users.

Whether it’s hair rollers, giant ice cubes or beer mats, your festive favourites make one thing clear: it’s party time

• The best Christmas gifts for 2025

Ever wish you could read people’s minds when giving them their Christmas presents?

Working for the Filter is like having that wish granted, only without the emotional fallout. You see, we get to find out which of our gift guide recommendations you’ve really loved – as opposed to the ones that make you say, “Oh, you really shouldn’t have.”

He’s played a reindeer, spent hours recreating Home Alone’s most lethal stunts – and now he’s having a yuletide disaster in Stuffed. The Man Like Mobeen star talks about interfaith Christmas … and why he refuses to go back to Lapland

Guz Khan is developing something of a reputation as Mr Christmas. The comedian and actor is about to release Stuffed, a Lapland-set one-hour comedy co-starring Morgana Robinson. This time last year, he voiced a reindeer in the Richard Curtis animation That Christmas. Two years before that, he made a festive special with James Acaster testing the scientific validity of Home Alone.

“It sounds like, based on all the projects you’ve just listed there, Christmas paid for the extension on my house,” Khan booms down the phone. “Christmas is way better than Eid, bro, based on the facts that you’ve just given me.”

Everyone’s favourite former PM is back! Her mission? To save Britain from its current ‘doomloop’ with, you guessed it, a YouTube talkshow

Will you be seeing a pantomime this year? Birmingham’s got Gok Wan and Biggins in Robin Hood, Bradford has Sinitta in Snow White, while Bromley landed Su Pollard for Beauty and the Beast. And at the end of YouTube’s infinite pier, there’s The Liz Truss Show, starring She’s-Behind-You herself. Curtain up on that one is tonight at 6pm.

According to the producers, Liz’s show “confronts the issues that others tiptoe around”. Wow. The lives, loves, and clinical explanations? Let’s just say I’d watch that. Sadly, this doesn’t seem to be the format. Instead, like all seasonal entertainment, The Liz Truss Show is based on a fairytale. “The deep state and their allies in the media and politics tried to destroy me,” madam explains in a statement, “now I’m back.” Are the gilt markets the deep state now? Honestly, I can’t keep up. You’ll remember that the irony of Truss’s flameout at the hands of market forces was particularly acute given that she had spent an entire career explaining that free markets were the greatest judge of absolutely everything. Small ideological adjustment: free markets are now the greatest judge of everything except the ideas and personage of Liz Truss.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Exclusive: Yinka Bankole felt compelled to speak out after Reform leader’s attempts to dismiss hurt of alleged targets

• I’ll never forget the look of hatred Nigel Farage had for me at school, simply because of how I looked

A former Dulwich college pupil who claims a teenage Nigel Farage told him “that’s the way back to Africa” has said he felt compelled to speak out after the Reform leader’s attempt at “denying or dismissing” the hurt of his alleged targets.

Yinka Bankole, who claims he had just started at the school when a 17-year-old Farage singled him out for abuse, said he had decided to tell his story in full after watching the Reform leader’s press conference on Thursday.

⚽ Trump gets inaugural Fifa peace prize at World Cup draw
⚽ Draw explainer | Qualifiers | Follow on Bluesky | Mail us

Benjamin gets in touch: “I am webmaster of www.national-football-teams.com !

“As you can imagine, draw day is quite something when international football is one of your things. I want to chip in on possible groups of death. These are the two of the hardest groups I could come up with:

Argentina

Morocco

Norway

Italy (If they qualify)

Spain

Colombia

Ivory Coast

Denmark (If they qualify)

Canada

Austria

Qatar

Cape Verde

Belgium

Iran

South Africa

Curacao

Exclusive: Billionaire is claimed to be anonymous figure behind $70m of wins in US legal case. He denies betting on his own teams

Tony Bloom, the billionaire owner of Brighton & Hove Albion FC, is facing questions over claims he was an anonymous gambler behind $70m (£52m) in winnings – which allegedly included bets on his football teams.

Bloom – one of the world’s most successful professional gamblers – is claimed to be the “John Doe” referred to in a US legal case that tried to unmask who has benefited from the lucrative winning streak.

Text signed by president seems to echo ‘great replacement’ theory, saying Europe faces ‘civilisational erasure’

Donald Trump’s administration has said Europe faces “civilisational erasure” within the next two decades as a result of migration and EU integration, arguing in a policy document that the US must “cultivate resistance” within the continent to “Europe’s current trajectory”.

Billed as “a roadmap to ensure America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history and the home of freedom on earth”, the US National Security Strategy makes explicit Washington’s support for Europe’s nationalist far-right parties.