As Labour flounders and dabbles in the politics of hatred to gain a point or two, it is those far from power who will suffer most

In the days since the largest far-right rally in British history, I keep hearing the same phrase. Friends will talk about those scenes, how London was packed with more than 100,000 day-trippers chanting “send them back”. Then they’ll say: “It’s the 1970s all over again.” I can almost see their minds playing the old reels of Enoch Powell and the National Front.

Being of similar vintage, I too know about abuse in playgrounds and getting chased by skinheads and the house-warming gift of a brick through the window (which the police didn’t deem racist because the motive wasn’t sufficiently explicit – guys, next time wrap it in a memo!). We’re still some way from those days, thankfully, but one important aspect is much worse. Back then, racism was a furtive, guilty pleasure: deep down, even bigots knew their bigotry was ugly. No more.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

Anderson updates Thomas Pynchon for the era of Ice roundups, pitting shaggy revolutionary Leonardo DiCaprio against cartoonish forces of reaction

One of the great creative bromances has flowered again: Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon. Having adapted Pynchon’s Inherent Vice for the screen in 2015, Anderson has now taken a freer rein with his 1990 novel Vineland, creating a bizarre action thriller driven by pulpy comic-book energy and transformed political indignation, keeping his pedal at all times welded to the metal.

It’s a riff on the now recognisable Anderson-Pynchonian idea of counterculture and counter-revolution, absorbing the paranoid style of American politics into a screwball farcical resistance, with a jolting, jangling, nerve-shredding score by Jonny Greenwood. It’s partly a freaky-Freudian diagnosis of father-daughter dysfunction – juxtaposed with the separation of migrant children and parents at the US-Mexico border – and a very serious, relevant response to the US’s secretive ruling class and its insidiously normalised Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) roundups: the toxic new Vichyite Trump enthusiasm.

In the 1970s, the radical leftwing German terrorist organisation may have spread fear through public acts of violence – but its inner workings were characterised by vanity and incompetence

In the summer of 1970, a group of aspirant revolutionaries arrived in Jordan from West Germany. They sought military training though they had barely handled weapons before. They sought a guerrilla war in the streets of Europe, but had never done anything more than light a fire in a deserted department store. They sought the spurious glamour that spending time with a Palestinian armed group could confer. Above all, they sought a safe place where they could hide and plan.

Some of the group had flown to Beirut on a direct flight from communist-run East Berlin. The better known members – Ulrike Meinhof, a prominent leftwing journalist, and two convicted arsonists called Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader – had faced a more complicated journey. First, they’d had to cross into East Germany, then they took a train to Prague, where they boarded a plane to Lebanon. From Beirut, a taxi took them east across the mountains into Syria. Finally, they drove south from Damascus into Jordan.

With US president hidden from public view, media focuses instead on peripheral sideshow of clowns drawn by state visit

Never in its long and august history has the No 10 bus from Windsor to Staines (via Datchet and Wraysbury) received a welcome like this. Its passage secured by police escort, its progress followed by the world’s media, the orange single-decker trundles regally up Windsor’s high street, while onlookers crane to get a glimpse of the single pensioner conveyed within. “It’s not him,” one man mutters, a little superfluously.

It was that kind of a day on the banks of the Thames: lots of excitement over very little, a sideshow that felt largely peripheral to the pageantry unfolding within the sealed castle grounds. “I’m afraid nothing’s going to happen, madam,” a police officer informed a woman filming a Facebook Live video from the kerb as he shooed her a safe distance back towards the pavement.

For 25 years, Justin and Nichola were an essential part of each other’s lives. Then, one random Wednesday, came a terrible, wrenching phone call

Many lifelong alliances begin with a period of mild intimidation, and so it was with my friendship with Nichola. We were 18, in the first year at university, and shared a few French classes. I didn’t know her name, had never heard her speak in English but, with her voluminous curls and friendly, curious stare, she stood out. I assumed she would be too cool to hang around with someone like me.

One weekend, at a student social in the grotty union bar, booze acted as an icebreaker and the guardrails dropped. Nods of recognition in the corridor became cheery hellos, then toasties in the cafe, followed by nights out and nursing hangovers in front of the TV in our dilapidated student houses.

Nvidia, OpenAI and Microsoft announce investments as part of multibillion-dollar package alongside Trump visit

Donald Trump’s arrival in the UK on Tuesday night was accompanied by a multibillion-dollar transatlantic tech agreement.

The announcement features some of the biggest names from Silicon Valley: the chipmaker Nvidia; the ChatGPT developer, OpenAI; and Microsoft. Big numbers were involved, with Microsoft hailing its $30bn (£22bn) investment as a major commitment to the UK – and adding, in an apparent swipe at its rivals, that it was not making “empty tech promises”.

US president heads to Chequers as former Meta executive Nick Clegg says UK must learn to be less reliant on US technology

Four men who were arrested after images of Donald Trump with Jeffrey Epstein were projected on to Windsor Castle have been bailed, PA Media reports. PA says:

A 60-year-old man from East Sussex, a 36-year-old man from London, a 37-year-old man from Kent and a 50-year-old man from London were arrested on suspicion of malicious communications on Tuesday night after the stunt at the Berkshire royal residence, Thames Valley police (TVP) said.

They were released on conditional bail on Wednesday night until December 12 while inquiries continue, according to the force.

Of course it’s great there’s investment in the UK, and it’s better still that a young, London-based company like Nscale is involved.

But these really are crumbs from the Silicon Valley table.

I sometimes wonder how we would react as a body politic if all that infrastructure, all of that technology that we depend on for every sort of minute detail of our lives, were produced by the French. I think there’d be absolute uproar from Nigel Farage and others.

Yet because of the very close partnership we’ve had with the United States, understandably so in the cold war period, I think we’ve been quite relaxed about this very heavy dependency … both in the public and the private sector, on American technology.

Mariam, Nasser and Ahmed were evacuated from the warzone but are now stranded in an Egyptian hospital that cannot treat their life-threatening injuries after Trump’s sudden ban on Palestinians entering the US

Mariam Sabbah had been fast asleep, huddled under a blanket with her siblings, when an Israeli missile tore through her home in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, in the early hours of 1 March.

The missile narrowly missed the sleeping children but as the terrified nine-year-old ran to her parents, a second one hit. “I saw her coming towards me but suddenly there was another explosion and she vanished into the smoke,” says her mother, Fatma Salman.

Those in top roles are five times as likely to have been to private school than general population, study finds

The privately educated are tightening their “vice-like grip” on some of the most powerful and influential roles in British society, such as FTSE 100 chairs, newspaper columnists and BBC executives, a report has found.

Those in the most important positions are five times as likely to have attended private school than the general population, showing it is still possible to “buy advantage”, according to the Sutton Trust.

ABC says late-night show will not air for foreseeable future after Kimmel accused Republicans of ‘doing everything they can to score political points’ from Kirk’s killing

• What did Jimmy Kimmel say about Charlie Kirk?

• ‘Censoring you in real time’: suspension of Jimmy Kimmel show sparks shock and fears for free speech

Jimmy Kimmel Live! will be suspended “indefinitely” after comments he made about the killing of Charlie Kirk, ABC has announced, hours after the Trump-appointed chair of the US broadcast regulator threatened broadcasters’ licenses if action was not taken against the late-night host.

The network, which Disney owns, announced on Wednesday night that it would remove Kimmel’s show from its schedule for the foreseeable future.