Marielle says being recorded is part of being her friend, but Beth is fed up of being a muse. Who should reel it in?

• Get a disagreement settled or become a YBTJ juror

Sometimes she films me while I’m eating. I’ll see myself on her Instagram – it’s like a jumpscare

I want Beth to see t hat the content we make together can get us a foot in the door

After record flooding submerged Bor in South Sudan in 2020, the emergency response ended up turning it into a beacon of climate crisis adaptation

The three friends fill yellow jerrycans and help each other lift them on to their heads for the short walk home. Nyandong Chang lives five minutes from the water kiosk and is here up to six times a day. “It’s still hard work,” she says, “but at least nowadays water is available and clean.”

Until last year, women and children in Bor, the capital of South Sudan’s Jonglei state, faced a much tougher chore – going all the way to the filthy stretch of the White Nile that runs near the town to draw the family’s drinking, washing and cooking water and carry it back.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

Overnight risk sentiment is “subdued after weaker revenue and higher capex requirement from Oracle”, reports Mohit Kumar of investment bank Jefferies .

Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.

“Oracle sold Ampere because we no longer think it is strategic for us to continue designing, manufacturing and using our own chips in our cloud datacenters.

We are now committed to a policy of chip neutrality where we work closely with all our CPU and GPU suppliers. Of course, we will continue to buy the latest GPUs from NVIDIA, but we need to be prepared and able to deploy whatever chips our customers want to buy. There are going to be a lot of changes in AI technology over the next few years and we must remain agile in response to those changes.”

The company continued to burn cash last quarter: its free cash flow reached a negative $10 billion. To make matters worse, the company said that it expects capex to reach about $50 billion in the fiscal year ending May 2026 – $15 billion more than its September forecast – and investments at Oracle are financed by debt: overall, the company has about $106 billion in debt.

Frankly, the report was not dramatically bad, but it came to confirm concerns around heavy AI spending, financed by debt, with an unknown timeline for revenue generation, sending Oracle shares down by more than 11% in after-hours trading.

9am GMT: IEA’s monthly oil market report

9.50am GMT: Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey speaks at Financial Times Global Boardroom event

11am GMT: Turkey’s interest rate decision

1.30pm GMT: US trade data for September

1.30pm GMT: US initial jobless claims

This Trinidadian family saga blurs the line between real and imagined to create a multilayered history of an island and its people

Ever Since We Small opens in Bihar, India in 1899. Jayanti dreams of a woman offering her bracelets. Within days, her husband becomes sick and dies. Widowhood is not an option and Jayanti prepares for her own sati . Determined to apply the “godly might of English justice” and uphold a law banning the practice, an English doctor and magistrate muscle in to stop her. In an 11th-hour volte face, Jayanti, desiring life over the afterlife, allows herself to be saved. Triumphant, the magistrate suggests she become his mistress, but instead she opts to be shipped off to Trinidad. The island, she’s told, is a place where the shame of her choice will be forgotten.

Ever Since We Small, Celeste Mohammed’s second novel-in-stories, is a more cohesive work than Pleasantview, which won the Bocas prize for Caribbean literature in 2022. The opening chapter follows on from an academic introduction and Mohammed’s style is more reverent, less ballsy and humorous, than the warts-and-all portraits drawn in Pleasantview; but casting characters from the distant past often has that effect on novelists. The tone is appropriate, however; Mohammed here is the sober observer taking in the fate of women like Jayanti, who if they have choices at all, they are between bad and worse.

No parent should worry about their child’s safety while they work. But a crisis in our early-years sector is shielding predators such as Vincent Chan

I remember those initial heart-wrenching days and weeks leaving my daughter, aged nine months, at the nursery. She was distraught as I left, and I – like so many parents – headed off to work feeling guilty for leaving her, wondering if I was doing the right thing. Every parent does the research and nursery visits, reads the Ofsted reports and assumes that the staff in their chosen nursery will have the necessary qualifications and training to take care of their child. Obviously, there will be hiccups along the way, but never in your wildest nightmares do you think your child might be physically – or worse still, sexually – abused.

Yet the harrowing case of Vincent Chan , a former nursery worker in Camden, north London, who pleaded guilty to nine counts of sexual assault and 17 counts of taking or making indecent photos of children, hit the headlines last week, leaving parents with young children across the country feeling physically sick and asking the question: How did this happen? Tragically, this is not an isolated case.

Munira Wilson is Liberal Democrat MP for Twickenham

Most metros use plastic or metal, but the distinctive fabrics on London’s network are full of clues to its history

When I first came to London from Yorkshire in the late 1980s, I found the tube replete with bizarre novelties. Among them was the way most trains required me to sit sideways to the direction of travel, as on a fairground waltzer. Directly opposite me was another person or an empty seat, and while I knew not to stare at people, I did stare at the seats – at their woollen coverings, called moquette. I have since written two books about them, the first nonfiction, Seats of London , and now a crime novel, The Moquette Mystery.

I was attracted to moquette firstly because it, like me, came from Yorkshire (most of it back then was woven in Halifax), and whereas many foreign metros have seats of plastic or steel, moquette made the tube cosy. Yet it seemed underappreciated. The index of the standard history of the tube, for instance, proceeds blithely from Moorgate to Morden.

Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?

Welcome back to the Thursday news quiz – a weekly exercise in trivia, triumph and asking: “How on earth did that make headlines in the Guardian?” As always, there are no prizes except the possibility of feeling unbearably smug when you get one right, and the knowledge that the official dog of the quiz, Willow, would be delivering you her very best side-eye every time you guess incorrectly. Let us know how you got on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 227

British government also rejects president’s claims on sovereignty over Falkland Islands as he suggests wanting to make Argentina a ‘world military power’

The British government has denied it is engaged in negotiations to lift a ban on selling arms to Argentina that has been in place since the Falklands war.

Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, told the Daily Telegraph his government had begun speaking to the UK about the restrictions.

Harry and six other public figures will have their day in court in January. Plus: Celia Imrie investigates Hitchcock’s Psycho. Here’s what to watch this evening

8pm, Channel 4
Expect legal fireworks in January as the case launched by Prince Harry (along with six other public figures including Doreen Lawrence and Elton John) against Associated Newspapers gets under way. This documentary presented by Cathy Newman offers a primer to the case – which involves accusations of phone hacking and bugging. Phil Harrison