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

• ‘A series like this, does it need it? I don’t think so’

• Root’s head-to-head with Starc may be decisive battle

It rarely takes much for an Englishman to be accused of whinging in Australia but when Joe Root was asked a simple question on Sunday — whether a series like the Ashes actually needs day-night Test cricket — he simply gave an honest answer.

“I personally don’t think so,” replied Root, before England began netting at the Gabba before Thursday’s second Test. “It’s obviously very successful and popular here, and obviously Australia have got a very good record [played 14, won 13]. You can see why we’re playing one of those games.

Before she was a TV mainstay, Judi Love was a single mum juggling standup with care work. Now she’s back on stage for a show that finds humour in past trauma: ‘It’s laughter that helped me’, she says.

Judi Love was 17 when she was kidnapped, though she adds a couple of years on when reliving it on stage. It was only the anecdote’s second to-audience outing when I watched her recite it, peppered with punchlines, at a late-October work-in-progress gig. The bones of her new show – All About the Love, embarking on a 23-date tour next year – are very much still evolving, but this Wednesday night in Bedford is a sell out, such is the pull of Love’s telly star power.

She starts by twerking her way into the spotlight, before riffing on her career as a social worker and trading “chicken and chips for champagne and ceviche”. Interspersed are opening bouts of sharp crowd work – Love at her free-wheeling best. Next, she’s at college, studying IT, but mostly “going into the games room looking for boys”. It’s here that Love meets this unnamed lad.

As we prepare to launch our eighth edition of our global list we present the members of this year’s voting panel, our biggest ever

After another gripping year of women’s football we are ready to launch our list of the best 100 female footballers in the world in 2025.

Our biggest ever panel includes familiar faces such as the outgoing Kansas City Current head coach Vlatko Andonovski, the new OL Lyonnes head coach, Jonatan Giráldez, and Australia’s Joe Montemurro.

Eldonian village was a forerunner in neighbourhood regeneration. Thirty years on it is fighting for survival

It was the utopian housing dream, a community project designed to support its residents from cradle to grave – 400 redbrick homes built around a village hall, leisure centre and playing fields, all of it owned and managed by the people who lived there.

The Eldonian village in Liverpool was heralded at the time of its completion by the then Prince Charles as a “leading example of a successful, community-led, bottom-up approach to neighbourhood regeneration”.

Hundreds of people still missing after heavy rain and mudslides in country’s deadliest natural disaster for years

Entire areas of Sri Lanka’s capital are flooded after a powerful cyclone triggered heavy rains and mudslides across the island, with authorities reporting nearly 200 dead and dozens more missing.

Officials said the extent of the damage in the country’s worst-affected central region was slowly becoming clear on Sunday as relief workers cleared roads blocked by fallen trees and mudslides.

Chancellor to face Sunday morning shows where she will be grilled over whether she misled the public about the state of the economy

Rachel Reeves said she “of course” had not lied about the state of the public finances before the budget. “Of course I didn’t,” she told Trevor Phillips.

Earlier, the chancellor had told his programme:

In the context of a downgrade in our productivity, which cost £16bn, I needed to increase taxes, and I was honest and frank about that in the speech that I gave at beginning of November.

The musical prodigy discovered Stevie Wonder aged two and danced to Brazilian jazz at a Grammys afterparty. But what song does he think is the best in the world?

The first song I fell in love with
So many songs hit me as a child, they were like windows opening up new worlds. But the first I truly loved was Did I Hear You Say You Love Me, by Stevie Wonder, which I remember clearly when I was around two years old.

The first single I bought
I bought an iTunes single by Take 6 when I was 13. They are a six-part a cappella, gospel, jazz group, and they completely exploded my creative imagination. The song, He Never Sleeps, has the most unbelievable harmonic journey.

Exclusive: French artist planning to cover bridge over Seine in tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude

The enigmatic French artist JR will undertake what he says is his biggest ever challenge next year when he “wraps” Pont Neuf, the oldest standing bridge across the Seine River in Paris, in a tribute to a monumental art project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

For three weeks next June, the 232-metre (761ft) long bridge will be wrapped in fabric, 40 years after the married artists known for their large-scale, site-specific environmental installations did the same thing.