Contrast the furious reaction to Rachel Reeves’s ‘mansion tax’ to the response offered to those living with real housing injustice: indifference

The new “mansion tax” announced by Rachel Reeves in last week’s budget is estimated to affect around 165,000 property owners, and on current trends the British media is forecast to have interviewed every single one of them by the end of the year. How else to explain the chorus of squeals we’ve been exposed to from the impoverished victims of Esher and Pimlico, whose only crime was to own a house worth over £2m in an era of egregious wealth inequality?

We hear, for example, from Philippa in Kensington, who tells the Telegraph that the new council tax surcharge on her two small mews houses will “wipe me out”. We hear from Paul, who owns a £2.5m house in Cobham, who tells the same newspaper that the move has wreaked havoc with his retirement plans. We hear in the Times from a property investor called Mark in Wimbledon, whose £9.5m house has been on the market for over a year, and gripes that he has had “almost no viewings in the last five or six months”. The Sun, for its part, evokes the spectre of “grannies being forced to sell up”, and condemns the levy as “a back-door way to seize chunks of family homes when hard-working Brits pass away”.

Jonathan Liew is a Guardian columnist

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Laying a table well is one of the best ways to make guests feel relaxed and cosy. Queen of tablescaping Laura Jackson’s advice? Forget the stiff old rules and have fun with it

A feast is not just about food. Just to sit at a table surrounded by the faces of your people: nothing beats it. A feast is about togetherness, whether there are two people at the table, or 16. The primal joy of good food taps into something even more fundamental than hunger; if food is a love language, a feast is a big hug.

Is it sacrilege to say that being a host matters more than being a cook? Not to disparage the skill of the chef. Quite the opposite, it takes skill to make really good gravy, concentration to remember to take the cake out of the oven before it burns, and years of experience to time a roast to come together at the right moment. It takes no skill to fold a napkin and light a candle, yet with a beautifully laid and bounteously laden table, the night feels special before dinner is served, which takes the pressure off.

Investment was not enough to save the courts, said the justice secretary. At least, not the amounts he was prepared to put in

Spare a thought for David Lammy. Not so long ago he was foreign secretary. His dream job. Turning left on boarding planes to go to meet his counterparts around the world. An important player in global geopolitics. Then he found himself out on his ear. Replaced by Yvette Cooper, who had been booted out of the Home Office for being perceived to be soft on asylum seekers.

But at least Yvette got to fail upwards. Lammy just found himself downgraded to justice secretary. A department that has been unloved, downgraded and underfunded for years. Worse still, David now finds himself being forced to advocate policies the old David Lammy never once dreamed of himself making. Even as foreign secretary he would have been shaking his head in disapproval. Yet needs must.

The rising star has made her debut film, Dreamers, a semi-autobiographical love story set in an immigration detention centre. She talks about fleeing persecution in Nigeria – and what she learned from French new wave

Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor had a little wobble when she stepped on to the stage after the screening of her debut feature, Dreamers, at the London film festival. The Nigerian-British director’s film is a love story set in an immigration detention centre. It had already premiered in Berlin earlier this year. But showing her semi-autobiographical film to a home crowd in London felt exposing. “I suddenly had this feeling: Oh my God, everyone can see me. Everyone knows everything about me.” She laughs.

Gharoro-Akpojotor has built a reputation as a rising star producer. Her company Joi Productions makes films telling black, female and gay stories. (“All of the above, sometimes individually.”) Her credits include Rapman’s Blue Story and Aml Ameen’s romcom Boxing Day, and she is currently working on Ashley Walters’ directing debut Animol.

Anthropic’s chief scientist says AI autonomy could spark a beneficial ‘intelligence explosion’ – or be the moment humans lose control

Humanity will have to decide by 2030 whether to take the “ultimate risk” of letting artificial intelligence systems train themselves to become more powerful, one of the world’s leading AI scientists has said.

Jared Kaplan, the chief scientist and co-owner of the $180bn (£135bn) US startup Anthropic, said a choice was looming about how much autonomy the systems should be given to evolve.

The use of ‘nudify’ apps is becoming more and more prevalent, with hundreds of teachers having seen images created by pupils, often of their peers. The fallout is huge – and growing fast

‘It worries me that it’s so normalised. He obviously wasn’t hiding it. He didn’t feel this was something he shouldn’t be doing. It was in the open and people saw it. That’s what was quite shocking.”

A headteacher is describing how a teenage boy, sitting on a bus on his way home from school, casually pulled out his phone, selected a picture from social media of a girl at a neighbouring school and used a “nudifying” app to doctor her image.

None of the former officers named by the IOPC will face disciplinary proceedings because they have all retired

• Timeline: decades seeking justice and change

The families of those who died in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster have said it is a “bitter injustice” that no police officer will ever be held accountable for a catalogue of failings set out in the final report of the police watchdog after a 14-year investigation.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) found that 12 police officers, most of them senior, would have faced disciplinary cases of gross misconduct if they were still serving.

Only cases such as murder and rape or offences carrying sentence longer than three years would face jury under plans

David Lammy has been accused of making a “massive mistake” by Labour MPs and peers after announcing radical plans to cut thousands of jury trials across England and Wales.

Defendants will no longer have the option to choose to have their cases heard before a jury, the justice secretary told the Commons. Magistrates’ powers will be extended from dealing with maximum sentences of one year to at least 18 months, he said, and a new judge-led court will be established.

Committee will examine value for money to taxpayers of leases of properties to members of royal family

The public accounts committee is to launch an inquiry into the crown estate and its leases on properties to members of the royal family after questions over the lease of Royal Lodge to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Publishing responses from the crown estate and the Treasury to detailed questions over the lease arrangements, the committee’s chair, Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, said: “Having reflected on what we have received, the information provided clearly forms the basis for an inquiry.” He said this would take place in the new year.

Putin’s comments appeared aimed at driving a wedge between Washington and European capitals

In parallel to Witkoff’s meeting in Moscow, we will also follow Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s first visit to Ireland.

He has arrived in Dublin last night, and has a busy schedule today, paying a brief visit to the country’s new president Catherine Connolly, before meeting with key government figures including the taisoeach, Micheál Martin, and addressing both chambers of the Irish parliament in the afternoon.