Ruins of Malcha Mahal in New Delhi, India. Photo / Getty Images
Welcome to the weekend, and to the start of December. For those who haven't already got a jump on Christmas, this weekend might be the perfect time to put on the carols and decorate the tree.
Whatever you're doing, make time for some great journalism and catch up on some of the best pieces from our premium international syndicators this week.
The royal family of Oudh is one of the Delhi's great mysteries. Their story has been passed between tea sellers and rickshaw drivers and shopkeepers in Old Delhi: In a forest, they said, in a palace cut off from the city that surrounds it, lived a prince, a princess and a queen, said to be the last of a storied Shiite Muslim royal line.
Every few years, the family agreed to admit a journalist, always a foreigner, to tell of their grievances against the state. The journalists emerged with deliciously macabre stories. In 1997, the prince and the princess told The Times of London that their mother, in a final gesture of protest against the treachery of Britain and India, had killed herself by drinking a poison mixed with crushed diamonds and pearls.
For 40 years these journalists chronicled the eccentric royal family of Oudh, deposed aristocrats who lived in a ruined palace in the Indian capital. It was a tragic, astonishing story. But was it true?
While conservative populism is now ascendant in some of the world's leading democracies, New Zealand is rushing in the opposite direction, taking on several liberal social issues all at once.
Next year, the country will hold public referendums to decide whether to legalise assisted suicide and recreational marijuana. Separately, lawmakers are considering a bill that would decriminalise abortion.
Those votes will come after New Zealand's Parliament voted 119-1 this month to enshrine in law an ambitious set of targets to reduce the country's carbon emissions.
This burst of democratic action is in contrast to the legislative gridlock that has gripped countries like the United States and Britain.
Born in Coventry, raised and schooled in Birmingham, further educated in Sheffield, resident in Manchester for many years working for Granada TV, Lee Child is every bit the no-nonsense, straight-talking candid son of industrial mid-to-northern England he ought to be. Ask him a question, he gives you an honest answer.
The latest Reacher, Blue Moon, came out last month. It topped the bestseller lists in London and New York, outselling Nos 2 to 10 combined. It will go on to sell around 600,000 copies, Child estimates, in hardback and ebook, and then another 300,000 or so in paperback come the spring.
Now that Harry Potter has hung up his broomstick, Child may be the bestselling author on the planet.
So what does the British writer put his phenomenal success down to? You'd be surprised.
Robert Crampton of The Times sits down to talk with the author.
Several months ago, Google hired dozens of actors to sit at a table, stand in a hallway and walk down a street while talking into a video camera.
Then the company's researchers, using a new kind of artificial intelligence software, swapped the faces of the actors. People who had been walking were suddenly at a table. The actors who had been in a hallway looked like they were on a street. Men's faces were put on women's bodies. Women's faces were put on men's bodies. In time, the researchers had created hundreds of so-called deepfake videos.
For internet companies like Google, finding the tools to spot deepfakes has gained urgency. If someone wants to spread a fake video far and wide, Google's YouTube or Facebook's social media platforms would be great places to do it.
The New York Times looks at how some experts fear we're losing the battle against deepfakes.
First came the horse-drawn wagon rolling through Arlington National Cemetery, carrying the remains of the first American killed in Afghanistan in a flag-draped casket.
Close behind came the family of CIA officer Johnny "Mike" Spann. His 32-year-old widow, Shannon Spann cradling their infant son, Jake.
Jake had no way of knowing he was at the nation's most distinguished military cemetery. Or that his father was among the first US warriors sent to Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks.
Pundits have been predicting Roger Federer's retirement for almost a decade. For nearly as long, he has defied their expectations. Lately, however, despite stressing that he is far from finished playing, Federer has started to talk more openly about what comes next.
That's where a company called On comes in.
Federer has become an investor in, as well as a contributing product designer and representative for, the brand, which was started in 2010 in Zurich.
After growing by word-of-mouth among endurance athletes and Olympians, and in running specialty stores, On is gaining ground as an underdog rival to giants like Nike and Adidas in the performance sports shoe category.
Throughout India, the number of days with very heavy rains has increased over the last century. At the same time, the dry spells between storms have gotten longer. Showers that reliably penetrate the soil are less common. For a country that relied on rain for the vast share of its water, that combination is potentially ruinous.
Decades of short-sighted government policies are leaving millions defenceless in the age of climate disruptions – especially the country's poor.
It was my hilarious fiancé's idea. He'd been watching Marie Kondo and complaining about the state of my flat. He'd discovered I did not own an iron. Or a kettle. And kept only nail varnish and vodka in my fridge. "You should go to wife school," he joked, googling it as we laughed. I don't know who was more surprised when several options appeared.
I barely need detail my objections to wife school. The very concept feels regressive and sexist. What does it even mean to be a "wife" in 2019, when I earn more than my fiancé does? Going to wife school would have remained a silly joke if, secretly, I hadn't also had my own worries about my suitability for marriage.
Bride‑to‑be Katie Glass signs up to the "wife factory" to find out how not to do it.
In his heyday, Roland Berger may have been the best-connected man in Germany. He advised chancellors and chief executives, founded one of Europe's leading management consulting firms and rode Germany's postwar rebound to become one of the country's richest self-made men. Business magazines put him on the cover.
But in the twilight of his career, Berger's image as ubiquitous boardroom consigliere and icon of the German economy is at risk. An exposé by the newspaper Handelsblatt asserts that he repeatedly misrepresented a key element of his personal history, portraying his father as a Nazi resister when in fact he was a high-ranking official.
"The first words Jimmy ever spoke to me were, 'I heard you paint houses,' " said the man now known as "The Irishman" shortly before his death.
The man was Frank Sheeran, and besides being an Irishman, he was also a bagman and hit man for the mob. Jimmy was James Riddle Hoffa, the Teamsters union president whose 1975 disappearance has never been solved, and the paint was not paint at all.
"The paint is the blood that supposedly gets on the floor when you shoot somebody," Sheeran helpfully explained in the book I Heard You Paint Houses (2004), written by a lawyer and former prosecutor, Charles Brandt, based on deathbed interviews with Sheeran and released posthumously.
With the long-awaited arrival of the Martin Scorsese drama The Irishman on Netflix, it's a good time to explain who's who in the crowded story and to try to answer a question Sheeran himself asks in the film:
"How the hell did this whole thing start?"
Have you heard the one about Pope Francis, Megyn Kelly and Adolf Hitler all walking into a bar?
Welcome to this year's Oscar race, a contest that is crowded with eccentric characters and no shortage of hot-button issues. Movies vying for a spot on the best-picture list include male-dominated dramas like Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood and Martin Scorsese's The Irishman, as well as female-led ensembles like Bombshell, starring Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman as Fox News anchors, and Little Women, reuniting writer-director Greta Gerwig with her Lady Bird star Saoirse Ronan.
The New York Times has sized up the current field, and it's a wide-open race.
Pope Leo XIV has focused on unity and tradition after Francis’ reformist tenure.