The controversial comedian makes a plea for empathy from the returning president in a strong week for the show

Saturday Night Live returns from holiday hiatus with MSNBC coverage of the impending presidential inauguration. Rachel Maddow (Sarah Sherman) presides over a panel of liberal pundits – including her doppelganger Chris Hayes (Andrew Dismukes) – essentially “the Avengers for your aunt”.

The panel promises not to let crazy a Trump outburst distract them from the real news like las time around, only to breathlessly report on the president-elect’s incoming comments and tweets, including a plan to trade Kentucky for Italy, sending Don Jr to purchase the Emerald City from Wicked, challenging China’s president to a fight in the UFC octagon, and a declaration of war on sharks.

Analysts say use of ‘flexibilities’ to avoid penalties shows that zero-emissions mandate does not need to be relaxed

No carmaker in the UK will have to pay fines for missing electric car sales targets in 2024, according to new analysis.

All but one carmaker sold enough cars, or will be able to use so-called flexibilities, to avoid steep fines under the zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV) mandate , according to estimates by T&E, a campaign group that focuses on transport and environment issues. One carmaker, Japan’s Suzuki, will have to buy credits from rivals to avoid fines.

The American author’s anthology of his many physical encounters is a spiritual quest as much as a sensual one

Don’t expect to read Edmund White’s The Loves of My Life with one hand. True, it is subtitled A S ex M emoir , and it hotly reminisces about a few dozen of the 3,000 partners White, who is 85 and still counting, has so far totted up. It does contain some glances at the more esoteric specialities of gay sex, including a scene in which White kneels in an abandoned Manhattan warehouse to imbibe six cans’ worth of warmly recycled beer “from the tap of my date’s microbrewery”. There is also a fortunately terse reference to what in medical shorthand is called a BM. But this coital anthology turns out to be about love and its dreamy spirituality, despite the risque and often risky rutting it describes.

Above all, White’s preoccupation is language, since for him sex initially ignites in the head and is consummated on the page, with bodily pleasure or pain as a merely intermediary stage. The itch of lust, in most of these encounters, soon turns into swooning poetic ardour. “Older queens”, as White says, tutor him in the technical skills that sex requires; to learn about the accompanying emotions, he returns to the Renaissance troubadours, who invented the idea of love in the songs and sonnets they addressed to an inaccessible mistress, “a remote, rather ball-shrinking stand-in for the Virgin Mary”.

Teacher from West Midlands has won substantial damages after fake clip was viewed millions of times and shared widely on social media

A teacher subjected to a torrent of abuse after doctored footage falsely alleged she used a racist slur while canvassing for the Labour party has said she was forced into hiding and feared it would ruin her career.

Cheryl Bennett, a PE teacher from Wednesbury in the West Midlands, was helping her colleague, Qasim Mughal, hand out Labour leaflets during the local elections in May last year, when she was recorded on a household security camera.

Wigmore Hall, London
A very unconventional set of instruments brought a touch of chaos to this esteemed venue as it hosted the London contemporary music festival’s finale

‘A home for the promiscuous music lover” is how the London contemporary music festival (LCMF) describes itself, but in fact it is a festival that has no permanent home of its own. Over the past 12 years it has led a peripatetic life around some unlikely London venues. The 2024 festival last month was based in Hackney, but one event was left until the new year, and that took place in the Wigmore Hall, bringing the slightly chaotic and distinctly anarchic character of the LCMF to one of the capital’s most respectable concert halls while halving the average age of the audience there in the process.

The concert ended with the world premiere of Éliane Radigue and Carol Robinson’s Occam Delta XXIII, a collaborative drone piece for baritone saxophone, trombone and percussion, inspired by the colours and wave patterns of the North sea. Here it was performed from memory and with immense concentration (there is no written score) by members of Ensemble Klang.

Emily Damari, Romi Gonen, and Doron Steinbrecher handed over to Red Cross after 15 months in captivity

• Israel-Gaza war – live updates

Three women held hostage by Hamas in tunnels beneath Gaza during 15 months of devastating conflict, including the joint British national Emily Damari, have been dramatically released in the first act of a ceasefire deal aimed at ending the conflict.

Damari, 28, Romi Gonen, 24 and Doron Steinbrecher, 31, were handed over to the International Committee for the Red Cross in Gaza on Sunday afternoon, ending a protracted ordeal that began with their violent abduction by Hamas on 7 October 2023.

Liverpool Black History Research Group accused America’s oldest private investment bank of sanitising its history

The links between the founders of the US’s most prestigious investment bank and enslavement have come under scrutiny after a campaign by historians in Liverpool.

Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH) is Wall Street’s oldest private investment bank, known for the role alumni have played in shaping US politics and the global economic order, with former partners including Prescott Bush , patriarch of the Bush political dynasty.

Three-phase deal requires new negotiations to advance and is highly vulnerable amid little trust between the sides

• Israel-Gaza war – live updates

The hours-long delay in implementing the Gaza ceasefire agreement is not a good omen for a deal that many fear could be doomed to failure as it moves through its challenging three phases.

While it is a truism that all negotiations to end conflicts rely on cautious trust building and are highly vulnerable to spoilers, the deal to end 15 months of fighting in Gaza that followed Hamas’s surprise attack on 7 October 2023 is more obviously fraught than most.