The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Teachers in England and Wales are burnt-out and barely functioning. Solving that will help young people and their families too

Tis the season to be jolly, unless you’re a teacher, in which case you are most likely a zombified wreck tenuously held together by caffeine and chocolate bars that aren’t even made of chocolate any more.

In the popular imagination, teachers finish at 4pm and have “all those holidays”. Yet at this point in the year, most I know are barely functioning. Colds are battled for weeks on end as we stumble through brief lulls in the day as though dazed, unable to string thoughts together. The half terms are, yes, a perk, but they are also a necessary buffer against complete burnout.

Lola Okolosie is an English teacher and writer

At a time when the UK and other countries are finally taking bold steps for climate, Canada is preparing a new oil pipeline

Last week, the United Kingdom did something all too rare: it chose leadership by backing science and prioritizing public safety. The Labour government announced it would ban new oil and gas licences in the North Sea, strengthen a windfall tax and accelerate phasing out of fossil-fuel subsidies.

These are not symbolic gestures. They are an acknowledgment that the global energy system is shifting and that mature economies must shift with it.

Tzeporah Berman is a Canadian environmental activist, campaigner and writer

Benefit claimants having applications denied for being deemed too risky by housing associations, says Crisis

The poorest people in England are being denied access to social housing owing to their low income, in a “catch-22” situation that is pushing more people into homelessness, research has found.

A new report from Crisis said that an ever depleting supply of social homes meant that housing associations were using strict criteria to choose new tenants, and people on low incomes and in receipt of benefits were having applications denied due to being deemed too risky.

Tory leader also wants time-limit for inquiry, as Labour criticised over delays and rows about investigation’s scope

• UK politics live – latest updates

A nationwide inquiry into grooming gangs must “consider the role of ethnicity, religion and other cultural factors”, the opposition leader, Kemi Badenoch, has said.

The government has faced criticism over its efforts to set up the inquiry, which has been subject to delays and rows about its scope.

Finch defends her daring to practise the male profession of poetry using heroic couplets and subversive jokes

The Apology

’Tis true, I write; and tell me by what rule
I am alone forbid to play the fool,
To follow through the groves a wandering muse
And feigned ideas for my pleasures choose?
Why should it in my pen be held a fault,
Whilst Myra paints her face, to paint a thought?
Whilst Lamia to the manly bumper flies,
And borrowed spirits sparkle in her eyes,
Why should it be in me a thing so vain
To heat with poetry my colder brain?

As midlife audiences turn to digital media, the 55 to 64 age bracket is an increasingly important demographic

In 2022, Caroline Idiens was on holiday halfway up an Italian mountain when her brother called to tell her to check her Instagram account. “I said, ‘I haven’t got any wifi. And he said: ‘Every time you refresh, it’s adding 500 followers.’ So I had to try to get to the top of the hill with the phone to check for myself.”

A personal trainer from Berkshire who began posting her fitness classes online at the start of lockdown in 2020, Idiens, 53, had already built a respectable following.

Friday’s ceremony in Washington DC was cringe-inducing and craven enough to make football fans nostalgic for the reign of Sepp Blatter

Well, that was awful, wasn’t it? Donald Trump’s heroic victory over a field of one to claim the inaugural Fifa peace prize , on-stage banter so dead it was already fossilized, Gianni Infantino doing crowd work, and Wayne Gretzky struggling through the pronunciation of “Macedonia” and “Curaçao” in the draw’s linguistic group of death: even with the benefit of a few days’ distance it’s impossible to overstate how impressively bad the draw for the 2026 World Cup, held last Friday at the Trump-purged Kennedy Center in Washington DC, was.

“This is America, so we have to put on a show!” roared Fifa president Infantino, resembling a Sphinx cat in a borrowed suit, at the beginning of the ceremony. And put on a show Fifa did – just not one that anyone wanted to watch, least of all a desperately bored-looking Trump, who sat through Andrea Bocelli’s Nessun Dorma with the granitic joylessness that has become his default expression at each of the sporting events he’s ruined with his presence this year. Just let the man get back to the White House; he’s the president of the United States, for god’s sake, he has bathrooms to redesign .

Brazil aide says Trump’s closure of Venezuelan airspace amounts to an ‘act of war’ that could escalate

• Maduro says the real reason for Trump’s Venezuela fixation is oil – is he right?

A US invasion or attack on Venezuela could plunge South America into a Vietnam-style conflict, the chief foreign policy adviser to Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has warned.

In an interview with the Guardian, Celso Amorim called Donald Trump’s recent decision to order the closure of Venezuelan airspace “an act of war”, and voiced fears the crisis could intensify over the coming weeks.