Guardian readers around the world voted in the this year’s contest, celebrating our spineless, friendly neighbours. But which creature won?

If you didn’t vote in the recent ballot, you missed out. Here was a vote where all 10 candidates were creative and morally upstanding, a vote unsullied by dubious lobbies, dodgy polls or demagogues. And if you’re seeking inspiration from a figure of strength who is also strangely cute then look no further than the winner of 2025 : Milnesium tardigradum , a microscopic multisegmented animal that resembles a piglet wrapped in an enormous duvet.

Thousands of Guardian readers around the world voted in the contest, which we invented to celebrate the overlooked, unsung heroes of our planet.

In the rugged Maiella national park, a secluded campsite offers everything from pitches to hotel-style rooms, guided walks to Abruzzo hospitality

There was a shift in atmosphere as a pewter cloud rumbled overhead. As we approached the end of our walk in the Maiella national park, we stopped beside the remains of a second world war prison camp, deep in the park’s corn-coloured hills, and Lisa, our guide, told us a story as dramatic as the simmering sky. In 1943, a band of prisoners, including New Zealand corporal John Broad, fled the camp and spent seven bitter winter months hiding out in caves before eventually making it across British lines. That they survived was thanks to the kindness and bravery of local families, who risked their own safety, and hunger, to help them stay alive and avoid German patrols.

Lisa told us that Broad later described the impoverished Abruzzesi as the country’s true gold, and the sun suddenly sliced through the cloud as though in divine agreement, painting the mountains opposite a shimmering bronze. Digesting both the story and the scenery, our small group of 12 were quietly contemplative as we picked our way back down the hillside to Dimore Montane , the campground we were staying at. The advancing evening turned the sky from lemon to peach to vivid negroni as we skittered down cobbled paths between pines, crossed sun-baked meadows rippled with lilac thistles, and strode past ancient tholoi , the sculptural stone shelters built by local shepherds.

Rightwing and populist leaders are seizing on conviction to push narrative they are being silenced – but legal experts disagree

The three-word message, launched minutes after the verdict came in, was succinct in its solidarity. “Je suis Marine!” Hungary’s Viktor Orbán posted on social media after France’s far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, was found guilty of embezzling European parliament funds and barred immediately from running for public office.

Messages soon came tumbling in from Brazil to Belgium, hinting at how rightwing nationalist and populist leaders had seized on the ruling to push their own narrative.

Clark Winter’s car photographs, taken during his travels around the globe, revel in nostalgia and reveal our strangely intimate relationships with our vehicles

Arash Rakhsha’s documentary follows two Kurdish friends just about getting by smuggling goods across the mountains

In an immersive and sweeping debut feature, Kurdish film-maker Arash Rakhsha portrays the plight of his people with sheer cinematic poetry. Shot over six years, the film closely follows Hamid and Yasser, two Kurdish friends who work side by side as kolbars , smugglers of untaxed household goods across the Iran-Iraq border. Coloured in icy shades of blue, their lives are filled with terrifying dangers, yet there’s also space for warmth and camaraderie amid the fog of precariousness.

Getting paid per kilogram, the pair haul heavy loads on their backs through treacherous terrain. One moment they are wading upstream, the next they are hiking through the steep, snowbound ranges of the Zagros mountains. The kolbars also rely on mules for transport, though this means they are easier to detect by the border patrols. Landmines – active souvenirs from the Iran-Iraq war – are also hazards on the winding paths; every year, about 200 kolbars die en route.

The Submarine author employs that novel’s warmth and wit in his investigation into whether his great-grandfather knowingly helped to make chemical weapons for the Nazis

Joe Dunthorne tells us he originally envisaged this book as a story of his grandmother’s childhood escape from the Nazis; the reality turned out to be more complex. Narrated with the twists and turns of a detective story, Children of Radium is a family memoir that records the mazy path by which the prize-winning Welsh novelist discovered just how little he knew of his German Jewish heritage. His journey begins with “a foot-high block of A4”: a 2,000-page unpublished memoir by his great-grandfather, Siegfried, a Jewish scientist who worked at a secret chemical weapons laboratory near Berlin before he and his family left for Turkey – not the panicky flit Dunthorne imagined, but a relocation bankrolled by employers with plans for what he could yet do.

Hunches, tip-offs, false trails and dead ends abound in Dunthorne’s quest to determine how much Siegfried knew – and when – about his work’s murderous potential after he was reassigned in 1928 from toothpaste manufacture by his firm, a specialist in radioactive products. Siegfried’s memoir is circumspect, and the hunt for answers isn’t straightforward: not only was the site of Siegfried’s lab heavily bombed, but Dunthorne’s mum also chucked his papers into the recycling while clearing out her late mother’s flat.

An eye for that kind of comedy, honed in Dunthorne’s novels – the best known is Submarine (2008), filmed by Richard Ayoade – brightens a quixotic voyage into the heart of 20th-century darkness. The trail leads through libraries, museums and medical records, but also less obviously writer-friendly locales: in Germany, he wriggles belly-first into a fenced-off radioactive site in a clandestine hunt for soil to test for gas traces; and in Turkey, Dunthorne blags his way through military checkpoints in the company of a formerly jailed member of the Kurdistan Workers’ party, having learned that one of the letters he has from Siegfried might hold evidence of culpability for a massacre in an eastern mountain town prior to the second world war.

Reunion tells an intriguingly layered story of redemption. Plus: Sam Mendes’ documentary about the cameramen who filmed the horrors of Belsen. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC One
After serving time for the murder of his best friend, Ray, Daniel Brennan (Matthew Gurney) is having his pre-release interview. The officer is firing questions but there is silence – Daniel is deaf, and an interpreter hasn’t been booked. This means the officials quickly lose track of him, as he leaves prison to reunite with his estranged daughter Carly (Lara Peake) and embark on a mission of revenge and redemption. Meanwhile, Ray’s wife Christine (Anne-Marie Duff) is keeping Daniel’s release from daughter Miri (Rose Ayling-Ellis) and new boyfriend Stephen (Eddie Marsan). This intriguingly layered opener sets up an unravelling story about what really happened between Ray and Daniel. Hollie Richardson

The more shocking the carnage becomes, the more people are punished for speaking out. This just makes it clear how much is really at stake

Graphic images. Distressing footage. Blurred-out posts that only clicking a consent button will reveal. For a year and a half now, disclaimers have hung over what the world sees from Gaza. Sometimes, the scenes stop me in my tracks as they are suddenly recalled, like a nightmare forgotten but then vividly remembered. Except without the relief that it was all a dream. Last week, I watched footage that showed what appeared to be the shattered, headless corpse of a baby. I have seen shredded body parts collected in plastic bags . Heard the screams of the dying and the silence of the dead, as cameras capture them piled together, some in entire families . Israel’s assault on Gaza defies inurement. As time goes by, even as the threshold for what is seen as intolerable increases, the graphic and varied forms of killing continue to scale the hurdle of numbness.

All the while, politics does one of two things. Either it smoothes over this historic calamity, resorting to the bland language of encouragements to return to the negotiating table, as if it were all some regrettable falling-out that could be resolved if only heads cooled a little, or the calamity is reversed. Calling for it to stop, rather than being the most natural of human instincts, is now an impulse that in some countries meets the bar of arrest or removal . This narrative renders the people of Gaza, so ever-present on our screens and timelines in their daily massacre, distant and remote. Gaza has been deported to another dimension in which no rules apply. Geographically it has been sealed off and wrenched away from the Earth. Foreign journalists and politicians are not allowed in. Local journalists are killed . Foreign aid is blocked. Local relief workers are murdered . International courts and human rights organisations speak with one voice about the criminality of what is occurring. They are summarily ignored or attacked by Israel’s sponsors.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

Analysis suggests prioritising projects that give quick local results may hold back support for populism

Areas that received money from the last government’s much-criticised levelling up fund tended to have lower votes for Reform UK in the general election, a study has found, indicating that projects delivering quick results may hold back support for populism.

The study by the Social Market Foundation (SMF) thinktank, billed as the first to examine a mass of data factors linked to support for Reform at the level of individual seats, identified a series of factors likely to make voters more likely to back Nigel Farage’s party.