The Night Manager’s Diego Calva and James Norton are also helping to build hype around small singular hoops

While Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet has been nominated for eight Academy Awards including best picture, for many it is a tiny silver hoop earring worn by Paul Mescal in his portrayal of William Shakespeare that steals the show. Worn in his left ear lobe, the barely there hoop has people fixated online.

“Begging my boyfriend to get a tiny hoop earring too,” reads one post dedicated to the accessory. “I cried for over half of Hamnet, but Paul Mescal’s slutty little earring made me feel conflicted,” reads another.

The first lady’s premiere was marked by conspicuous absences. It turns out chumminess with the president might just come at a cost

Who wasn’t on the red carpet at the official Melania documentary premiere in Washington DC was so much more intriguing than who was. No offence to defence secretary Pete Hegseth, but if I wanted to see formalwear struggling to contain Crusades tattoos, I’d hang around outside the Spartak Moscow Christmas party. Not that it was a red carpet, because the carpet at the “Trump-Kennedy” Center was black. No one bothers hiding the grift any more, with the movie’s own producer openly explaining that this aesthetic was “all about supporting this luxury brand that [Melania’s] creating”. They should have dressed the event like a colon, since Donald’s is effectively where it was being held.

Anyway: arrivals. There was Melania and Donald Trump – she finally got him out of hair and makeup – who were holding hands, a coincidentally convenient way to cover his skin if his glam squad didn’t truck in enough concealer. In recent months, Trump has had terrible bruises on the tops of his hands and even more terrible excuses for why they keep appearing. Aspirin, Swiss furniture, shaking lots of hands – the list of things that aren’t cannula sites grows longer every week.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

After a very hard landing into fame in the 00s, he decided to take a softer approach – and hit on a winning formula for classic comedy. The star talks about his fantastical new show Small Prophets, his obsession with middle-age and being ‘weird-looking’

In Small Prophets, BBC Two’s new six-parter, Mackenzie Crook plays Gordon, the manager of a massive DIY store. Sometimes it feels as if we’re falling through time, because it’s like watching Gareth, Crook’s breakthrough part in The Office, a quarter of a century on. “Pedantic and jobsworthy, he could be Gareth grown up, just with more disappointment, without the West Country accent,” says Crook. “I wrote Gordon as a monster, but by the end, I was actually quite fond of him.”

In person, Crook has a jumpy, modest energy. When he was young, on screen it used to look like nerves, but now looks more like curiosity. He has a surprising number of tattoos, but maybe I should stop being surprised when people have those.

Pilloried as a multimillion-dollar sweetener, Amazon’s Brett Ratner-directed portrait of the first lady has opened with a grand ‘black-carpet’ premiere in Washington and mysteriously empty cinemas around the planet

Thursday night in Washington saw the world premiere of Melania, Brett Ratner’s $40m film about the first lady and one of the most expensive documentaries ever made. At the lately renamed Donald J Trump and John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, guests including House speaker Mike Johnson and health secretary Robert F Kennedy waved to reporters from the black carpet (which was paying homage to the first lady’s favourite colour) before making their way up steps emblazoned with her name in glowing monochrome block capitals. Once the film began, unreeling its profile of Melania Trump over the 20 days leading up to her husband’s January 2025 inauguration, press were barred.

Everyone was welcome to attend the UK’s first screening on Friday morning, yet all tickets to the 9.40am screening at Sittingbourne’s Light cinema’s 34-seater screen three remained unsold – until I bought one. Ten minutes before it began, doors to the multiplex were still locked and only gulls were patrolling the puddles outside the entrance. Screenings this early were unusual, an usher confirmed, “usually it’s just kids films”.

Twelve showings of Melania – which does in fact have a PG rating in the UK – are scheduled over its week-long Sittingbourne run, for which a total of six seats have so far been sold. By contrast, 59 seats have already been snapped up for the first-day screenings of Wuthering Heights in a fortnight, and 33 for Being Victoria Wood next Tuesday.

Ahead of the centenary of Davis’s birth, musicians including Terence Blanchard and John Scofield analyse his brilliance: from his soft phrasing and spiritual feel to his raspy cussing and leather outfits

The architect of the bestselling jazz album of all time, 1959’s Kind of Blue, trumpeter Miles Davis is a towering figure in the history of the genre. Possessed of a piercing tone, innate melodic sensibility and a singularly uncompromising approach on the bandstand, Davis spent his five-decade career presiding over numerous stylistic shifts: bebop to “cool” jazz, modal jazz, electronic fusion, jazz funk and even hip-hop. Always honing his ear for fresh talent, he turned his bands into incubators for rising artists, providing early starts for the pianists Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett, saxophonists Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter, and drummers Tony Williams and Jack DeJohnette.

With 2026 marking the centenary of Davis’s birth, I asked several of his surviving collaborators to select his greatest recordings and discuss his enduring influence, including the 95-year-old Rollins, who played with Davis in the 1950s; the guitarist John Scofield and the saxophonist Bill Evans, who both played with Davis in his 80s fusion groups; and several contemporary jazz stars.

How does it feel when ICE agents swarm your city? Minneapolis residents on why they are rising up

Since the beginning of January, thousands of ICE agents have been deployed to the city. Confusion, violence and chaos followed. Two people have been killed, hundreds have disappeared – but that’s not the full story. Because thousands of residents in the city have been mobilising.

Annie Kelly spoke to five people living in Minneapolis about how they have been taking on ICE – and the consequences. Patty O’Keefe explains what it’s like to be a legal observer, and how ICE agents smashed her windows and detained her. Jenny talks about why her childhood experience of her father being detained by ICE has pushed her to stand up for others. A teacher explains how the city has changed and an organiser on why tactics have had to change as ICE strategies have developed. “We all grab a whistle before we leave. I know it’s a joke here. Make sure you’ve got your keys, phone, wallet, gloves, and now your whistle.”

Starmer confirms immediate removal, but it is unclear if sanctions remain on former MP, academic and barrister

• UK politics live – latest updates

China has lifted the sanctions it imposed on serving British MPs and peers in a significant sign of warming relations after Keir Starmer travelled to Beijing for landmark talks with Xi Jinping.

Nine UK citizens were banned from China in 2021, including five Conservative MPs and two members of the House of Lords, targeted for highlighting human rights violations against the Muslim Uyghur community.

Lemon’s lawyer said he was taken into custody after attending protest in which demonstrators disrupted a church service earlier in January

• US politics live – latest updates

Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor, was arrested late on Thursday on charges that he violated federal law during a protest at a church in Minnesota earlier this month, according to his lawyer.

Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Lemon, said that Lemon was “taken into custody by federal agents last night in Los Angeles, where he was covering the Grammy awards”.

Deng Chol Majek stabbed Rhiannon Whyte 23 times in ‘sadistic’ attack at railway station

A Sudanese asylum seeker has been jailed for at least 29 years for the “sadistic” murder of a woman who was working at the hotel where he lived.

Deng Chol Majek is believed to have entered the UK by small boat less than three months before stabbing Rhiannon Whyte, 27, with a screwdriver 23 times at Bescot Stadium station in Walsall in October 2024.

Far-right activist tells X followers to vote for Reform’s Gorton and Denton candidate, Matthew Goodwin

Labour have accused the Reform UK candidate for the Gorton and Denton byelection, Matthew Goodwin, of representing “toxic politics” after he was endorsed by the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson.

The move will be uncomfortable for Nigel Farage, who has consistently kept the parties he leads separate from Robinson, an anti-Islam campaigner and one of the UK’s leading far-right figures.