As the second Trump presidency begins, John Harris and John Domokos go to a Staffordshire town whose economy went from coal to Amazon warehousing to find out if 21st century populism

is cutting through. At a byelection down the road, meanwhile, there's a big question facing voters: Labour or Reform UK?

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You only need look at its dire social media presence to see where this party, so full of potential, is going wrong

Starmerism has proved a political calamity, and this should be a moment for the left. Yet it is the radical right, in the shape of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which is making all the running. Where is the Green party of England and Wales?

After all, it was the left that long warned of the Labour leadership’s serial deceit and lack of answers for a crisis-ridden country. The assault on the winter fuel payment was an austerity-driven attack on social security, and Labour ruling out tax hikes on the rich meant the new government backed itself into a corner, opting for a jump in employers’ national insurance contributions, the worst possible choice in Britain’s precarious economic circumstances.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

Police say driver of Land Rover that crashed into Study Prep school in 2023, killing two girls, has been arrested

The driver of a Land Rover which crashed into the Study Prep school in Wimbledon, south-west London, on 6 July 2023, killing schoolgirls Nuria Sajjad and Selena Lau, has been arrested after detectives reopened the investigation, the Metropolitan police have said.

More details soon …

Doug Gurr, who replaces Marcus Bokkerink at CMA, says he wants to encourage business investment

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The new chair of the UK’s competition regulator has promised to make its investigations into mergers and takeovers “simple and rapid”, after government pressure for regulators to do more to support its economic growth agenda.

Doug Gurr, the former Amazon UK boss who was announced as the new chair of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) earlier this month, said that a regulatory environment that encourages the “greatest possible level of business investment” would be the agency’s new “north star”.

As the Video Game History Foundation opens a new digitised archive, what can titles like Crash, Mega, Edge and GamesMaster tell us about the early days of gaming?

Before the internet, if you were an avid gamer then you were very likely to be an avid reader of games magazines. From the early 1980s, the likes of Crash, Mega, PC Gamer and the Official PlayStation Magazine were your connection with the industry, providing news, reviews and interviews as well as lively letters pages that fostered a sense of community. Very rarely, however, did anyone keep hold of their magazine collections. Lacking the cultural gravitas of music or movie publications, they were mostly thrown away. While working at Future Publishing as a games journalist in the 1990s, I watched many times as hundreds of old issues of SuperPlay, Edge and GamesMaster were tipped into skips for pulping. I feel queasy just thinking about it.

Because now, of course, I and thousands of other video game veterans have realised these magazines are a vital historical resource as well as a source of nostalgic joy. Surviving copies of classic mags are selling at a vast premium on eBay, and while the Internet Archive does contain patchy collections of scanned magazines, it is vulnerable to legal challenges from copyright holders.

Hujar warmly captured gay life in downtown New York in the 1970s but was little known in his lifetime

The curators of an exhibition of one of New York’s most important photographers, who captured gay life in the city during the 1970s, hope the show will shed new light on an artist whose work was deemed too “difficult” in his lifetime.

Eyes Open in the Dark , which opens at Raven Row in London on Thursday, is the largest UK exhibition of photographs by Peter Hujar , who has been acclaimed for the warmth and compassion of his images but was little known during his lifetime.

With building codes strict and land values high, Big Apple apartment blocks tend to be grim. But two firms, SO-IL and Tankhouse, are fighting back with lush courtyards, breezy landings – and glass-walled toilets 15 storeys up

For all its metropolitan dynamism and heady sense of possibility, New York is not a city that produces good housing. Its building codes are so strict, its land values so high, and its construction practises so intractable, that the results tend towards grim stacks of cells. New apartment blocks – even at the high end – do little to disguise the fact that they are simply physical spreadsheets of units, expressions of brutal economic efficiency, occasionally garnished with a thin architectural dressing.

“New York is supposedly the greatest, most competitive city on Earth,” says Sam Alison-Mayne, who grew up in Los Angeles, son of the prominent west coast architect Thom Mayne . “Competition usually breeds the best solutions for things – but not when it comes to housing.” While he was working as a contractor, he met Sebastian Mendez , an Argentinian architect at Foster + Partners at the time, and the two realised there was scope to do things differently. They quit their jobs, founded a development company, Tankhouse , and, 10 years later, have built three of the city’s most innovative housing projects in recent memory.

Andrew Taake, 36, assailed police with bear spray at the US Capitol and in 2016 was charged with a third-degree felony

A convicted US Capitol attacker who was freed from prison by Donald Trump ’s decision to pardon essentially every participant in the January 6 uprising must now grapple with an unresolved charge of having solicited a minor.

At the center of the case in question is Andrew Taake, 36, of Houston, Texas, who assailed police with bear spray and a metal whip when a mob of Trump supporters descended on the Capitol in early 2021 in a desperate attempt to keep him in office at the end of his first presidency, according to prosecutors.

As a former Libyan foreign minister, I urge the world not to let Syria become another cautionary tale of a nation left to crumble under the weight of global apathy and splintered leadership

In December, the world watched in awe as Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria imploded . But as Syria rejoices, I bear a warning: we cannot let Syria’s power vacuum fester into another civil war, as the international community did in Libya.

As Libya’s first female foreign minister, I am painfully aware of what is at stake. When images of our own dictator’s dead body were broadcast to the world in 2011, we believed Libya had been liberated. But the euphoria of revolutions often gives way to darker realities.