Who’s propping up the bar with quizmaster Keir Starmer? Answers below (no cheating now!)

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Spotted all the famous faces? See how you did …

1 Sydney Sweeney’s on the bar there, in her denims. Does this mean she is a eugenicist? No, it doesn’t. Are you OK?

As two beloved presenters stand down, speculation is rife over who may take up the ‘very sparkly baton’

After more than two decades with Strictly Come Dancing, Claudia Winkleman and Tess Daly are approaching their last tango.

The much-loved presenters will present the show’s live final on Saturday night and make their last appearance together for the Christmas Day special.

A social housing victory at the ‘luxury’ Battersea power station development shows the power of grassroots politics – and holds a lesson for all of our cities

What happens when international capital arrives on your doorstep and threatens to devour your home? The residents of the housing estates surrounding Battersea power station in London, including the Patmore where I was raised, faced that prospect when, in 2012, a consortium of Malaysian investors bought the derelict power station, decommissioned since 1983, for £400m.

Two years earlier, David Cameron had launched the Conservative manifesto in the ruined power station. He promised to increase foreign investment into the UK, and so the international investors came and bought the thing and much more. Over the years, Battersea and the adjacent Nine Elms area was refashioned as a playground for oligarchs and other international elites. The US embassy arrived, a world-first glass sky pool was commissioned, and when Battersea power station shopping centre opened in 2022, it came with Rolex and Cartier stores, luxury private members’ clubs and apartments with multimillion-pound price tags.

Jewish voices say an attack of this kind was entirely predictable given the surge in antisemitic attacks in Australia since 2023

The sun rises early at this time of year, hitting the south of the beach first before chasing the shadows north, the gradual retreat of the darkness to the light.

Hanukah, the Jewish festival of lights, was being celebrated here on Sunday evening, when the darkness came brutally roaring back.

The actor on impersonating Elvis, her stint as a magician’s assistant on a cruise ship, and having eyes like currants

Born in Hertfordshire, Sarah Hadland, 54, attended Laine Theatre Arts college in Surrey. From 2009 to 2015, she played Stevie in the Bafta-nominated sitcom Miranda, and her other television work includes Horrible Histories, Waterloo Road, W1A, The Job Lot and Daddy Issues. This Christmas, she appears on The Festive Pottery Throwdown and The Celebrity Apprentice, and stars as the Wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the Marlowe theatre in Canterbury. She lives with her child in London.

What is your earliest memory?
I remember putting on my sister’s dungarees – they were purple and flared – to do an Elvis impression and my family laughing, and thinking: “Oh, this is good.”

Eight years ago, after yet another disastrous festive get-together, my mother decided we needed professional help. Which is how a new festive tradition began

It is early December, and I am sitting in a psychoanalyst’s office in central London, about to do 60 minutes of pre-Christmas family therapy. Outside, the Christmas lights are twinkling. I can hear a drunk person literally shouting for joy on the street beneath the window. But inside the consulting room, it is eerily silent. My mother, my sister and I sit in squishy armchairs and pretend to admire the art, but really we are eyeballing one another like prizefighters, looking for weak spots. My father is just a tiny, flickering face on an iPhone, propped up next to my mother on a cushion. My father doesn’t really believe in therapy, but he’s compromised by dialling in via Zoom. He keeps falling off his cushion and on to the floor.

Our therapist peers benevolently at us over her spectacles. She is in her 80s and has a world-weary look about her. Like she has seen all manner of dysfunction before. She lets the silence hang for a moment, and then she clears her throat: “Shall we begin with presents? Or the meal?”

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor reclines across five people in one photo watched by Ghislaine Maxwell at Sandringham

• Jeffrey Epstein files: latest updates

Photographs of the child sex offenders Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell released by the US justice department appear to show how Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor facilitated their access to British high society.

Epstein and Maxwell are pictured hunting with the former prince at Balmoral and with him in the royal box at Ascot. A separate picture shows Maxwell outside 10 Downing Street.

Experts forecast spending will be more than 12% up on same period in 2024 after lucklustre figures so far

Retailers are hoping for a last-minute dash for the shops this weekend after a lacklustre run-up to Christmas, with UK households forecast to spend £3.4bn, up more than 12% on the same weekend in 2024.

Almost 50m shopping trips will be made by last-minute Father Christmases over the weekend, according to research by analysts GlobalData for Vouchercodes.co.uk, the vast majority of which will be to retail destinations including high streets and shopping malls.

Heating means pests breeding and spreading faster, warn scientists, with simplified current food system already vulnerable

• How climate breakdown is putting the world’s food in peril – in maps and charts

The destruction of food supplies by crop pests is being supercharged by the climate crisis, with losses expected to surge, an analysis has concluded.

Researchers said the world was lucky to have so far avoided a major shock and was living on borrowed time, with action needed to diversify crops and boost natural predators of pests.

The government is preparing a £50m bailout for Ineos’s Grangemouth plant, after Jim Ratcliffe asked for help in October

Chemical companies owned by the billionaire Jim Ratcliffe had already been granted as much as £70m in UK state aid in the past four years, before this week’s £50m government bailout for its Grangemouth plant in Scotland.

State aid to Ineos in the last year alone was between £16m and £38m, according to government disclosures published this week. Since August 2022 the company has received between £28m and £70m.