Leader John Swinney says independence could cut household energy bills by a third in the long term

The future of Scottish renewables will underpin the Scottish National party’s Holyrood election campaign , the party leader, John Swinney, has said, as he claimed independence could cut household energy bills by a third in the long term.

At what was billed as the first campaign event before next May’s elections to the Scottish parliament, Swinney declared: “It’s Scotland’s energy” – mirroring the famous 1970s slogan “It’s Scotland’s oil”, which bolstered the SNP’s first Westminster breakthrough.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s new book, The Diary of a Prisoner, is being released this week – and also details the time he spent in jail

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has said Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) party is “not a danger” to France, and he would not support a united front of parties against Le Pen at the next election.

In his new book, written at a “small plywood table” in prison where he recently served 20 days of a sentence for criminal conspiracy, Sarkozy said many of his former supporters were now potential Le Pen voters, and he appeared to include the RN in his vision of a broad French right.

Linklater is missing from the best director list despite having two nominated films, and actors including Sydney Sweeney and Josh O’Connor are nowhere to be seen. It looks like Paul Thomas Anderson’s year

• Golden Globe nominations: One Battle After Another leads the charge

• Golden Globes 2026: full list of nominations

It’s become traditional to look for the snubs in any award list – and heaven help anyone whose job it is to curate the “in memoriam” montage on the night and then the next morning apologise for the inevitable hurtful omissions.

Snubs have become a cliche of awards season commentary, but you have to wonder about the best director list of this year’s Golden Globes nominations. No Richard Linklater? This amazing director actually has two films in the “best musical or comedy” section (so I guess he can’t really be that depressed). There’s his amazingly witty and poignant chamber piece Blue Moon , with Globe-nominated Ethan Hawke playing depressed Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, and his eerily accomplished pastiche-homage Nouvelle Vague , about the making of Godard’s classic Breathless, shot not in the boring old colour in which these events happened but in a beautifully realised monochrome – a little reverential for my tastes but still a marvellously accomplished picture. Two films in one year, and such different films. Quite a feat.

Actor, who starred in The Passion of the Christ, will play the disgraced ex-Brazilian president in film written by his one-time secretary of culture

Jair Bolsonaro , the former Brazilian president now in prison for plotting a coup, is getting the biopic treatment.

Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, is reportedly filming a “heroic” portrait of the rightwing ex-politician in secret. Dark Horse, directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh and written by Mário Frias, who served as secretary of culture under Bolsonaro, started shooting three months ago in Brazil, where Bolsonaro served as president from 2019 until 2023. He was sentenced to 27 years and 3 months in prison in September 2025 for leading a criminal conspiracy to stop his leftwing rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva , taking power, though his supporters deny the allegations and have compared the prosecution to the “lawfare” faced by Donald Trump before he was re-elected.

Charity worker had joined 40 demonstrators ‘bearing witness’ to the loss of three lime trees in Falmouth

A charity worker suffered a head injury when police tried to remove her from a protest against trees being felled in a Cornish seaside town.

Debs Newman, 60, was “bearing witness” to the loss of three mature lime trees in Falmouth when she was seized by officers.

Miner will have to do things by the book after ditching plan to pay bosses millions in bonuses after Teck deal

• Anglo American drops plan to pay bosses millions in bonuses

Shareholder rebellions over executive pay aren’t what the used to be. In the past 18 months, bumper incentive arrangements for the bosses have been approved at AstraZeneca , the London Stock Exchange Group and Smith & Nephew . All those companies have managed to argue successfully that, since the bulk of their revenues are made on the other side of the Atlantic, the executives should be paid like Americans.

Perhaps it was such favourable votes (for the executives) that persuaded the remuneration committee of FTSE 100 miner Anglo American that its cheeky “resolution 2” within the proposed $50bn all-share merger with the Canadian group Teck Resources wouldn’t cause a fuss.

Sagal Hassan and Dr Lisa Williams respond to the news that Wes Streeting has asked experts to investigate whether normal feelings have become ‘over-pathologised’

As a psychotherapist with child and adolescent mental health services, I welcome Wes Streeting’s change of heart on his comments about the “overdiagnosis” of mental health conditions, ADHD and autism ( I realise now that my view on mental health overdiagnosis was divisive. We all need better evidence, 4 December ). Political point-scoring has no place in public health.

By setting up this taskforce, Streeting acknowledges the complexity of the picture and that conversations must be led by research, where science and suffering can be held together.

Readers respond after another former Dulwich college pupil spoke out with allegations of racist behaviour by the Reform UK leader

Regarding Nigel Farage’s difficulty believing that people can remember schoolboy “banter” of more than four decades ago ( Former Dulwich pupil says Farage told him: ‘That’s the way back to Africa’, 5 December ), perhaps I can helpfully direct him to an African proverb: “The axe forgets, the tree never does.” This succinctly summarises the disparity in recollections of interactions between victims and perpetrators.
Juliet Winstone
Dorking, Surrey

• “Farage has suggested that it is simply inconceivable that anyone could recall such events of over four decades ago,” says Yinka Bankole in your article. Such events that hurt children or young people, whether words or actions, are remembered for the whole of a lifetime. I remember a similarly unpleasant event that happened to me at the age of 13 on 14 February 1964. I could go to the exact spot. That was more than six decades ago, not four.
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