Released from prison in 2020 after being jailed for ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’, he became increasingly desperate to leave – before seizing his opportunity

As he trekked up the lush mountain range on China’s border with Laos, Lu Yuyu felt exhausted. He had been travelling for days, dodging his official minders to slip out of China. His travelling companions were smugglers who he’d paid 15,000 yuan (£1,622) to help him escape, and forced him to keep going until he could be delivered to two men and a scooter for the final few hours of his journey to freedom.

But leaving China was only the first step. Lu had thousands more miles before he would truly feel safe.

The lesson of 4 October 1936 is that fascism has to be physically challenged, not just demonstrated against, writes Nick Moss

Tracy-Ann Oberman is right to highlight the importance of the battle of Cable Street in the history of the working-class movement (The battle of Cable Street is entwined in my family’s history – and its message of hope still resonates, 28 December). One lesson the left appears to neglect is that Cable Street was, indeed, a battle, not a passive demonstration.

Anti-fascists engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with both Blackshirts and their police escorts throughout the day. Fascists were attacked by local people from the moment they began to assemble at Tower Hill, and fighting continued until the British Union of Fascists’ march was called off.

The landmark prohibition on mining in 2017, a world first, has been reversed by authoritarian leader Nayib Bukele but the move has met fierce resistance from environmentalists

Vidalina Morales realised that something was wrong with the water where she lived in 2004. A toxic red stain spreading through the San Sebastián River in the department of Cabañas in El Salvador seemed to contaminate the environment and worried residents.

As part of a campaign to protect her home and the environment, Morales, 54, visited mining projects near the river to learn about the risks the extractive sector posed. “I was shocked by the extent of the destruction of their environment,” she says.

After an attack by riot police in Cairo, I returned to the US with both arms in plaster, and found there would always be a place at the table for me

• In our end of year series, writers and public figures remember the place or time when they felt most at home

I can’t remember how I got the sequinned skirt on but I’m pretty sure the eyeliner was wobbly. Both arms in a cast does not precision cat-eye make. But it was New Year’s Eve and what’s the point if you’re not going to sparkle, and I’m an Egyptian in New York so the black eyeliner was practically a national duty.

And then I went round the corner, crossed the street and entered Chez Lucienne, my local and the neighbourhood French restaurant, foolishly with no reservation, and got a table anyway because all the waiters knew me. I could tell you which country each of them had supported in the previous year’s World Cup because I was the only person at the bar in the middle of the day watching matches being held hours away in South Africa.

Mona Eltahawy writes the FEMINIST GIANT newsletter. She is the author of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls and Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution

Four months on from the far-right violence that shocked the UK, what happened to the men living in a hotel that was targeted?

The Holiday Inn Express on Manvers Way, just outside Rotherham, stands quiet and empty. There are hints that something has happened here: cracks in some of the windows, and round the back, if you know where to look, remnants of police tape. But there are no obvious signs of the violence that took place in August, nor of the danger faced by the hotel’s former residents, who, many say, were lucky to escape with their lives when the hotel was set alight during a far-right riot.

It was hot on Sunday 4 August when what had been advertised on Facebook as a peaceful protest, triggered by the murders of three girls in Southport, turned violent. At its height, about 750 people gathered, some from the local area but many from much farther afield.

Exclusive: Force reaches out-of-court settlement with Xanthe Wells, who was accused of being at pro-Palestine demonstration

Scotland Yard has paid £5,000 in an out-of-court settlement after allegedly unlawfully imprisoning a 17-year-old who was wrongly accused of being at a pro-Palestine protest where a building was spray-painted.

The case is said by civil liberties campaigners to be compelling evidence of a heavy-handed approach by the Met to the policing of demonstrations over the last year.

Refusal to leave palace for successor backed by autocratic Georgian Dream party on day of departure stirs protesters

In Georgia’s turbulent political standoff, President Salome Zourabichvili has emerged as a defiant figure.

Zourabichvili’s role in Georgia is ceremonial, but far from fading into irrelevance in the twilight of her presidency, she has become a rallying figure for those opposed to the erosion of democracy and the abandonment of Georgia’s European aspirations. On Sunday, she is supposed to step down and hand the Orbeliani Palace to her successor, Mikheil Kavelashvili, a former football player backed by the ruling party, Georgian Dream, but she has said she will refuse.

Hundreds of thousands gather in central Seoul to protest against president suspended over martial law declaration

Hundreds of thousands of South Koreans flooded central Seoul on Saturday in the latest wave of protests demanding the removal of the country’s suspended president, Yoon Suk Yeol, a day after parliament voted to impeach his acting replacement.

Organisers claimed that more than 500,000 people participated in the rally, which took place amid a large police presence.

Freedom of information request reveals 21 of 24 marches banned in last 30 years were proposed by far-right groups

The bar is said to be appropriately high, but there have been 24 marches banned by a home secretary following a police request in the past 30 years under section 13 of the 1986 Public Order Act.

Two of those prohibited had been organised by “anti-capitalist groups” and one was recorded by the Home Office as being a “religious march” planned by an unnamed group in Luton. But of those 24 banned marches, 21 were proposed by far-right groups: the BNP, National Front, English Defence League and the White Nationalist party, a now-defunct neo-Nazi outfit.

HK$1m rewards target people accused of national security crimes who fled after pro-democracy protests

Hong Kong police have announced bounties of HK$1m (about £105,000) for information leading to the arrest of six democracy advocates based overseas and accused of national security crimes.

Authorities also said they would cancel the passports of seven others for whom bounties had already been issued, including the former lawmakers Ted Hui and Dennis Kwok, local media said.

Weariness, confusion, flashes of anger – for me, English Teacher’s lyrics evoke the texture of British life today

The most revelatory experience I had this year happened at Glastonbury, on the festival’s Saturday night. I was at the Left Field, the 1,500-capacity big top where the afternoons begin with panel discussions about politics, and the evenings are given over to music. The penultimate attraction of the day was a quartet from Leeds called English Teacher, who played for an hour, and took my breath away: not just because their music was brimming with ideas and creativity, but because it also seemed to perfectly crystallise the state of the country. As the performance went on, the crowd received it all with an increasing feeling of rapture; by the end, it felt like everyone had concluded that they were experiencing something very special indeed.

Their first album, This Could Be Texas, came out in April. Its songs do not achieve their feats with rhetoric or sloganeering, nor have much to do with party politics: their subject matter is too kaleidoscopic to be reduced to simple social or political commentary, and like the best zeitgeist-capturing musicians, English Teacher deal in poetic, impressionistic, often wonderfully strange language. The words written, sung and spoken by the singer and lyricist Lily Fontaine sometimes suggest fragments of conversations you might hear at bus stops, or in pubs or cafes, full of a sense of life having been upturned, but human beings somehow muddling on: “Shoes were bought, broken in / One new pair breaks the bank … Can a river stop its banks from bursting? Blame the council, not the rain / No preparation for the breakdown … That country is in a bad state / There’s a familiar atmosphere about the place”.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

Woman jailed for M25 protest not allowed to continue home detention because electronic tags are too big

A 77-year-old environmental activist will spend Christmas in prison despite having been released on an electronic tag, because the authorities cannot find an electronic device small enough to fit her wrists.

Gaie Delap, a retired teacher and a Quaker from Bristol, was jailed in August, along with four co-defendants, for her part in a campaign of disruptive Just Stop Oil protests on the M25 in November 2022.

From break dancing to nude bathers and the country’s best mullets, here’s a selection of our photographers’ finest work

Protester Anna Holland says their shock at being behind bars was quickly followed by a stronger feeling of power

• Record number of protesters will be in UK prisons this Christmas

Anna Holland, 22, was one of two young people from Just Stop Oil who threw tomato soup over a sunflowers painting by Vincent van Gogh – one of the highest-profile climate protests of recent years. The painting was not damaged, although there was damage to the frame. Holland was sentenced to 20 months in prison. They sent this letter to the Guardian about their experience behind bars.

It was a shock at first that the judge had gone to the extreme of our sentence. The first few days and nights in prison were hard but also such an education. So many of the women I have met here are in prison because they were not properly protected by the state, so they have taken me under their wing. I have been looked after, taught the ways of prison, not by the staff but by the other prisoners. It is like nothing I had expected and it is completely overwhelming – but also surprising how quickly I found myself falling into the daily routine.

Forty people, aged 22 to 58, incarcerated for direct actions on climate and Gaza actions amid crackdown on dissent

• ‘You won’t find the real criminals here’: a Just Stop Oil activist in jail at Christmas

A record number of people who have taken part in protests will be in prison in the UK this Christmas, raising concern about the ongoing crackdown on dissent.

Forty people, aged from 22 to 58, will be behind bars on Christmas Day for planning or taking part in a variety of protests relating to the climate crisis or the war in Gaza. Several of them are facing years in prison after courts handed down the most severe sentences on record for direct action protests.

Jacinta Allan’s plans to give police ‘wide-ranging power’ to help tackle antisemtism could be used against other protesters, lawyer says

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

The Victorian government has been accused of “shoehorning” new anti-protest measures that could be used to crack down on the climate movement into a suite of fresh measures touted as necessary to combat antisemitism.

On Tuesday, Jacinta Allan announced a suite of legislative proposals to crack down on what the premier said was antisemitism and extremism at protests. The proposals were announced in the wake of an arson attack on a Melbourne synagogue.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email

US-Canadian founder of Sea Shepherd was arrested in Greenland after Japan issued international warrant

Denmark has rejected a Japanese request to extradite anti-whaling activist Paul Watson over criminal charges dating back more than a decade, a Danish lawyer representing Watson said on Tuesday.

US-Canadian Watson, 74, founder of the Sea Shepherd conservationist group and of the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, has now been released from detention in the Greenland capital Nuuk, Greenland police said.

Jacinta Allan announces measures targeting protests in bid ‘to combat antisemitism’ after synagogue attack

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Protesting could be banned outside places of worship – while face masks and certain flags could be prohibited at other demonstrations – under proposed Victorian legislation announced in response to an arson attack on a Melbourne synagogue.

Jacinta Allan announced a suite of legislative proposals on Tuesday to crack down on what she said was antisemitism and extremism at protests. This included a ban on the flags of listed terrorist organisations including Hamas, Hezbollah and white nationalist extremist groups.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email

Demonstration organiser the London Renters Union says that rising rents are destroying communities

Demonstrators gathered in London on Saturday to protest against the capital’s “soaring” rents.

Rising rents are destroying communities, said organisers the London Renters Union (LRU).

Those who protested outside Catholic churches believe they would have been arrested if such laws were in place

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Survivors of clergy abuse have expressed deep concern at proposals to ban protests outside places of worship, with lawyer John Ellis saying a blanket ban would have seen him arrested outside a Sydney cathedral last year.

Anthony Albanese on Wednesday backed proposals in New South Wales and Victoria to ban such protests in the wake of the firebombing of the Adass Israel synagogue and antisemitic vandalism in Sydney.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email