THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY: The latest issue features ‘A Fighting Chance’ – Can COP conferences deliver on climate justice?

Bitter rows, implacably opposed delegations, threatened walkouts and then, hours after the planned deadline with fear of failure stalking the delegates, a statement towards which recalcitrant countries have been nudged into agreeing is produced. Cop30, which concluded last Saturday in Belém, Brazil, was little different from its recent predecessors, despite the growing urgency of needing to find a solution to our ever hotter planet. For this week’s big story, environment editor Fiona Harvey details how weak consensus was forged between states on the frontline of climate change and the petrostates that sought a rollback from the need to “transition away from fossil” fuels agreed two years ago in Dubai.

Five essential reads in this week’s edition

Spotlight | Is Ukraine edging closer to a peace deal?
A whirl of international diplomacy was sparked by a US-Russian authored ‘peace plan’ to end the Ukraine war. Luke Harding and Pjotr Sauer cast a critical eye over the prospects for an agreement.

Spotlight | Trump, Saudi Arabia and shifting Middle Eastern sands
Pageantry and trillion-dollar promises reveal how Washington’s regional loyalties may be tilting away from Israel and towards the Gulf, writes Julian Borger

Feature | Is Alex Karp the world’s scariest CEO?
His company, Palantir, is potentially creating the ultimate state surveillance tool. Now, Alex Karp’s biographer reveals what makes him tick. By Steve Rose

Opinion | An improbable new adversary for Trump – the Catholic church
Inequality, immigration and civil rights are the battlegrounds on which the church – and some other Christian denominations – are fighting the Trump administration, writes Simon Tisdall

Culture | Edmund de Waal’s loose ends
The celebrated ceramicist explains to Charlotte Higgins why he turned his decades-long f ixation with Axel Salto – the maker of unsettling stoneware full of tentacle sproutings and knotty growths – into a new show

THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY: The latest issue features ‘Epstein’ – The scandal that won’t go away.

The release last week of a tranche of Jeffrey Epstein’s private emails raised more questions about Donald Trump’s links to the disgraced financier.

The US president had spent much of this year trying to bat away questions about Epstein while rejecting pressure to release the bulk of the files. But in an abrupt reversal on Sunday – widely seen as an admission that he cannot control his Maga base on the issue – Trump urged House Republicans to back the release of the files after all.

That was duly passed this week and if the Senate also votes the same way, the justice department will be compelled to release all unclassified materials on Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.

So we may soon find out what Trump has tried for so long to keep buried. As David Smith writes for our big story, last week’s email release pointed less to a grand conspiracy and more to an elite world in which wealthy, powerful and privileged individuals operate above the law.

One thing’s for sure: despite Trump’s wishes, the Epstein scandal isn’t going away just yet.

Spotlight | Can methane cuts avert climate disaster?
With temperatures breaching limits set out in the Paris Agreement, designed to mitigate climate change, experts say tackling the powerful gas could buy crucial time as the clean-energy shift stalls. Fiona Harvey reports

Spotlight | The US military’s plans for a divided Gaza
A ‘green zone’ will be secured by international and Israeli troops, while almost all Palestinians have been displaced to a ‘red zone’ where no reconstruction is planned, reports Emma Graham-Harrison

Feature | What chance did one boy have to survive on Britain’s streets?
When documentary film-maker Pamela Gordon first met Craig in Nottingham, he was 13 and homeless. She still thought his life might turn around, but she was tragically wrong

Opinion | Labour’s asylum plans are cruel, overspun and unachievable
There is mounting disquiet among Labour MPs, while the vulnerable refugees at the heart of this story are living with a renewed sense of panic, writes Diane Taylor

Culture | Stranger Things reaches its upside down finale
After a decade, the Netflix hit is bowing out. Ahead of its last episodes, the show’s creators and cast talk to Rebecca Nicholson about big 80s hair, recruiting a Terminator killer – and the birds Kate Bush sent them

THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY: The latest issue features ‘A New Hope’ – How Zohran Mamdani broke the mould of US politics’

The dust may have settled on Zohran Mamdani’s astounding, against-the-odds victory in the New York mayoral election. But a week on, the scale of his achievement looks no less impressive.

As Ed Pilkington outlines in this week’s big story, Mamdani swept away his establishment-backed heavyweight opponent Andrew Cuomo by mobilising an army of grassroots volunteers and donors, while also connecting deeply with the voters whose support he most needed on the issues that mattered most to them, namely affordability and economic justice.

It’s a ground-up approach to doing things that US Democrats – who also won governorships in Virginia and New Jersey on an encouraging night – can learn from as they reflect on a torrid year since Donald Trump swept to power.

Spotlight | The green monster of Cop30
Amid bombast, strife and competing interests, is the annual climate summit, which opened in Brazil this week, still the forum we need to save the planet? Fiona Harvey reports from the Amazonian city of Bélem

Spotlight | The extraordinary fall of the BBC’s top bosses
A whirlwind that began with a report criticising the editing of a speech by Donald Trump is part of a wider political story, some say. Media editor Michael Savage charts the tale

Feature | Why not everyone is sad to see the end of USAID
When Donald Trump set about dismantling USAID, many around the world were shocked. But on the ground in Sierra Leone, the latest betrayal was not unexpected. Mara Kardas-Nelson finds out why

Opinion | A president groped? Sadly it isn’t a shock
After Claudia Sheinbaum was assaulted last week, her opponents claimed she staged it. From their own experiences, the women Mona Eltahawy met know she didn’t have to

Culture | Rosalía, the Catalan queen of pop
With a towering new album about female saints in 13 languages, she’s pop’s boldest star – and one of its most controversial. She tells Laura Snapes why we need forgiveness instead of cancel culture

THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY: The latest issue features ‘A Massacre Foretold’ – The Tragedy of El Fasher’

For some time now, El Fasher in Sudan has been a city beyond the reach of journalists. But the haunting satellite image on our cover this week, of smoke billowing from fires near El Fasher’s airport, told its own story as starkly as anything that could be reported from the ground.

Other satellite images showed clusters of burned-out vehicles, and what appeared to be pools of blood beside piles of bodies on the ground. A massacre was under way that could be seen from space.

The last major city in Darfur to fall to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) was already the scene of catastrophic levels of human suffering, but has “descended into an even darker hell”, senior UN officials warned last week. This key moment in the two-and-a-half-year-long civil war has unfolded in plain sight with minimal intervention from the international community, unless you count the United Arab Emirates, which has been arming the RSF paramilitaries.

Spotlight | The Andrew formerly known as a prince
Stupidity and self-entitlement sank King Charles III’s disgraced younger brother – and the royal reckoning may not be over yet, writes Stephen Bates

Technology | What if the internet just … stopped working?
Could everything suddenly go offline and if so, how? Aisha Down goes inside the fragile system holding the modern world together

Interview | Margaret Atwood puts the world to rights
At 85, she’s a literary seer and saint – and queen of the Canadian resistance. So what does the writer make of our dystopian society? Lisa Allardice finds out

Opinion | World leaders: Cop30 could be your great legacy
With the US backing away from the climate crisis, now is the moment when other nations must step up, says former British prime minister Gordon Brown

Culture | Back to black with Lynne Ramsay
The Scottish film director burst on to the scene with Ratcatcher and terrified audiences with We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her latest film stars Hollywood darling Jennifer Lawrence, but it doesn’t flinch from the dark side of family life, finds Amy Raphael